Role Summary:

The Engineering Manager is the single accountable leader for the entire platform engineering organisation. You own the people, the delivery, the cross-team coordination, and the operating conditions that allow the Infrastructure Architect, the QA Architect, and the platform engineering leads across all six layers to do the best work of their careers. This is not a technical individual contributor role with a management title it is a genuine management role that requires you to build a high-performing, psychologically safe, delivery-oriented team, and to represent that team's work, needs, and risks credibly to the leadership.

The platform introduces management challenges that go beyond standard software delivery: AI agent outputs are probabilistic rather than deterministic, which means the team's definition of 'done' requires statistical confidence rather than binary pass/fail; the orchestration DAG evolves nightly via machine learning, which means the system the team shipped on Monday is not exactly the system running on Friday; and the platform's own STLC agents are making recommendations about how to build and test software, which means the engineering team is simultaneously building the platform and being influenced by its outputs. Managing engineers who are building something this novel requires both technical credibility and exceptional people skills.

What You Will Own:

1. People Leadership & Team Development:

- Directly manage the Infrastructure & Platform Architect and the QA Architect as senior IC direct reports: set clear performance expectations, provide regular structured feedback, support their architectural authority within the organisation, and create the conditions for them to lead their own sub-teams effectively.

- Manage the engineering, run 1:1s, set objectives, give feedback on technical direction and team dynamics, and ensure each lead has the information and autonomy they need to deliver.

- Own career development across the org: hold career conversations, identify growth opportunities within the platform (e.g., a DevOps SWE-II with SRE potential, a functional test engineer ready for an agent quality specialism), support promotion cases with evidence, and flag retention risks early.

- Build and maintain a psychologically safe team culture: on a platform this complex, the ability to surface problems early a subtle agent confidence drift, an architectural decision that is not ageing well, a cross-team dependency that is becoming a bottleneck is more valuable than a culture of managed optimism. You create the conditions where engineers tell you the hard things before they become incidents.

- Manage performance proactively: set clear expectations at every level, distinguish between a performance issue and a role-fit issue, and address both with appropriate urgency and fairness. An underperforming engineer on an on-call rotation for a 99.9%-SLO platform affects the entire team, not just themselves.

- Protect engineering focus: the ASDLC platform is a high-visibility internal programme with significant stakeholder interest. You are the first line of defence against context-switching, scope creep, and meeting load that erodes the deep work time that complex AI infrastructure engineering requires.

2. Delivery Management & Programme Execution:

- Own the delivery of the roadmap: translate strategic priorities from the leadership into engineering plans, maintain a realistic view of capacity across all six layer teams, and make sequencing decisions that balance feature delivery against infrastructure reliability, technical debt, and the nightly Sleep-time learning improvement cycle.

- Run the programme cadence: sprint planning, backlog refinement, cross-team dependency reviews, and retrospectives adapted to the specific rhythm of an AI platform where agent quality metrics and HITL escalation rate trends are as important to review as velocity and burndown.

- Own cross-team coordination across all six layers: the ASDLC platform's layers are tightly interdependent (L2 Context Core changes affect all 53 L3 agents; L5 Sleep-time Learning mutations affect L2 DAG and vector store state overnight; L6 infrastructure changes affect every layer's availability). You maintain the dependency map, identify coordination failures before they become blocking, and run the cross-team forums that keep six engineering teams aligned.

- Manage the Architecture Board process: ensure significant architectural decisions (ADRs) are reviewed, approved, and communicated across the engineering organisation in a timely way; support the Infrastructure Architect and QA Architect in preparing and presenting ADRs; and maintain the ADR register as a living governance artefact.

- Own release governance: the release readiness criteria span functional test pass rates, CI performance gate compliance, security CVE counts, open penetration test findings, and agent eval pass rates. You own the release decision process, ensure the QA Architect's release readiness criteria are applied consistently, and communicate release status and risks to the leadership.

- Manage technical debt and platform reliability as first-class delivery concerns: maintain a visible tech debt register, ensure debt remediation work is resourced alongside feature delivery, and represent the engineering cost of deferred reliability improvements in every roadmap conversation.

- Own incident management at the programme level: during P1 incidents, you ensure the right engineers are engaged, that the SRE and DevOps leads have the authority and resource access they need to resolve the incident, and that post-incident review actions are tracked to completion not just written and forgotten.

3. Stakeholder Management & Organisational Communication:

- Serve as the primary interface: provide weekly status updates, surface risks and blockers with context and recommended actions, and translate complex technical situations (a nightly Sleep-time learning cycle that is degrading agent output quality, a Neo4j cluster approaching capacity, a security finding requiring architectural change) into the business-impact framing that enables executive decisions.

- Coordinate with the product organisation on roadmap prioritisation, Product Demos, and GTM content ownership.

- Represent the platform engineering organisation in company-wide engineering forums: architecture reviews, security reviews, compliance reviews, and engineering all-hands. You ensure the platform's work, needs, and risks are visible and understood across the wider organisation.

4. Operational Excellence & Engineering Health:

- Own on-call health across the platform engineering organisation: ensure on-call rotations are sustainable, that alert noise is tracked and reduced systematically, that MTTR trends are moving in the right direction, and that engineers are not experiencing on-call fatigue on a platform with a published 99.9% availability SLO.

- Own the engineering health metrics that sit above any single team's metrics: cross-team deployment frequency, change failure rate, mean time to restore across all six layers, and the HITL escalation rate trend that is the platform's primary quality north star. Ensure these metrics are visible, understood, and improving.

- Drive the toil elimination agenda across the organisation: the SRE Engineer owns toil elimination within their domain, but the EM is accountable for ensuring that cross-team toil manual release steps, environment provisioning bottlenecks, repetitive oncall investigation patterns is tracked, prioritised, and reduced at the programme level.