Sr. Engineering Manager, Platform at Vercel

This role is ideal for a seasoned engineering leader with a deep background in infrastructure and platform reliability. You should have at least 8 years of expe

Work type: remote

Location: Hybrid - San Francisco, New York City

Salary: $208,000 – $300,000/yr

Type: Full-time

Summary

This role is ideal for a seasoned engineering leader with a deep background in infrastructure and platform reliability. You should have at least 8 years of experience building distributed systems and 3+ years in management. The team is looking for a "player-coach" profile—someone who possesses the technical depth to navigate Kubernetes and CI/CD outages but excels at setting long-term strategy and managing high-performing, independent engineers. The position offers a highly competitive salary (up to $300k base) plus equity at a high-growth company shaping the modern web. You will oversee two sub-teams (Reliability & Resilience and Developer Productivity), giving you a broad surface area that includes everything from API gateways and petabyte-scale storage to SaaS vendor negotiations. While hybrid in NYC or SF is preferred, there is potential for remote flexibility for exceptional candidates. **You might be a good fit if you:** * Have managed production environments involving Kubernetes, SLOs, and incident response at scale. * Are comfortable balancing hands-on technical guidance with high-level organizational planning. * Have experience managing cloud costs, capacity forecasting, and large-scale SaaS vendor relationships. * Thrive in a "shipping-focused" culture and can lead teams through technical conflict toward clear decisions.

Job Description

## About Vercel:

Vercel gives developers the tools and cloud infrastructure to build, scale, and secure a faster, more personalized web. As the team behind v0, Next.js, and AI SDK, Vercel helps customers like Ramp, Supreme, PayPal, and Under Armour build for the AI-native web.

Our mission is to enable the world to ship the best products. That starts with creating a place where everyone can do their best work. Whether you're building on our platform, supporting our customers, or shaping our story: You can just ship things.

## About the role:

We are looking for a Sr. Engineering Manager to join our Platform team. You will lead two teams (Reliability & Resilience and Developer Productivity) made up of 7 engineers, with a clear growth path to 10+. You will own strategy, execution, and people leadership across core platform and operational domains including local developer environments, CI/CD, Kubernetes, API gateway, storage and caching, observability, secrets management, cost and capacity management, as well as SaaS vendor relationships . You will report to Sr. Director of Engineering and will be located in the US (preferably NYC or SF; remote considered for exceptional candidates).

If you’re based within a pre-determined commuting distance of one of our offices (SF, NY, London, or Berlin), the role includes in-office anchor days on Monday, Tuesday, and Friday, even if the role is listed as remote. For location-specific details, please connect with our recruiting team.

## What you will do:

Lead and grow a team of highly independent engineers across Reliability & Resilience and Developer Productivity teams; set org structure, hiring plan, and delivery goals.

Own the platform roadmap and execution for improvements in development velocity, iteration speed, platform availability, and deployment safety.

Build an industry-leading reliability practice: manage SLOs and error budgets, run incident response and postmortems, and prioritize resilience work across critical services.

Operate and evolve core platform services including API gateway, storage and caching infrastructure, secrets management, and observability.

Manage capacity and cost: forecasting, right-sizing, tuning, and spend governance tied to workload and growth plans.

Own key relationships with critical SaaS vendors supporting our platform stack, including evaluation, contracts/renewals, and operational integration.

## About you:

3+ years managing engineers (managing managers is a plus)

Hands-on technical depth in Kubernetes production operations, CI/CD systems.

Track record owning key platform dependencies such as API gateways, caches, petabyte-scale KV stores and databases.

Demonstrated ownership of reliability programs: SLOs, error budgets, incident response, postmortems, and measurable reductions in downtime.

Proven ability to translate business goals into technical strategy and drive cross-org alignment

8+ years building and operating large-scale distributed systems

Track record establishing trust, psychological safety, and clear expectations; skilled at timely, candid feedback

Strong facilitator in technical conflict—you listen, synthesize, decide, and bring the team with you

## Bonus if you:

Have experience using Vercel platform

## Benefits:

Competitive compensation package, including equity.

Inclusive Healthcare Package.

Learn and Grow - we provide mentorship and send you to events that help you build your network and skills.

Flexible Time Off.

We will provide you the gear you need to do your role, and a WFH budget for you to outfit your space as needed.

The New York, NY pay range for this role is $208,000-$300,000. Actual salary will be based on job-related skills, experience, and location. Compensation outside of San Francisco may be adjusted based on employee location. The total compensation package may include benefits, equity-based compensation, and eligibility for a company bonus or variable pay program depending on the role. Your recruiter can share more details during the hiring process.

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