Senior Manager, Platform Engineering

We're seeking an experienced Senior Manager, Platform Engineering to lead our infrastructure software engineering team responsible for Marqeta's Kubernetes-based compute platform. This is a critical technical leadership role at the heart of our infrastructure, supporting the applications that process millions of payment transactions with ultra-high availability requirements.

You'll drive platform modernization, cost optimization, and operational excellence while leading a team of infrastructure software engineers who build and maintain the foundational systems that enable Marqeta's engineering organization to ship quickly and reliably.

We work Flexible First. This role can be performed remotely in the United States, only in one of our National or Premium locations, which you can review here.

The Impact You’ll Have

Leadership & Team Development

• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of infrastructure software engineers focused on Kubernetes platform engineering
• Build a culture of innovation, operational excellence, and customer-focused platform development
• Recruit top talent and develop career growth paths for team members
• Foster collaboration with application development teams, SRE, security, and other infrastructure teams
• Drive technical decision-making while empowering engineers to own their solutions

Platform Strategy & Modernization

• Define and execute the technical roadmap for Marqeta's Kubernetes compute platform
• Drive continuous platform modernization to support evolving business needs and scale requirements
• Champion platform-as-a-product mindset, treating internal engineering teams as customers
• Evaluate and integrate emerging technologies and AWS services to improve platform capabilities
• Lead architectural decisions for container orchestration, service mesh, observability, and developer tooling

Cost Optimization & Efficiency

• Develop and implement strategies to optimize Kubernetes infrastructure costs without compromising performance or reliability
• Monitor and analyze compute resource utilization, identifying opportunities for right-sizing and efficiency gains
• Implement FinOps practices including chargeback/showback models, budget alerting, and cost allocation
• Drive adoption of cost-effective AWS services and spot instances where appropriate
• Partner with engineering teams to optimize application resource requests and limits

Operational Excellence & Availability

• Ensure ultra-high availability of the production Kubernetes platform supporting payment processing workloads
• Establish SLOs/SLIs for platform reliability and performance
• Lead incident response for platform-level issues and drive continuous improvement through blameless postmortems
• Implement comprehensive monitoring, alerting, and observability solutions
• Balance innovation with stability through disciplined change management and deployment practices

SDLC & Platform Engineering

• Design and implement CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation for platform infrastructure
• Apply software development best practices to infrastructure code (testing, code review, version control)
• Drive infrastructure-as-code initiatives using Terraform and other automation tools
• Collaborate with security teams to embed security into the platform and SDLC
• Enable developer productivity through self-service capabilities and golden paths

Technical Environment

You'll be working with technologies including (but not limited to):

• Container Orchestration: Kubernetes, Amazon EKS
• Cloud Platform: AWS (multi-account architecture)
• Infrastructure-as-Code: Terraform, Helm
• CI/CD: Argo
• Observability: DataDog

Who You Are

• 8+ years of experience in infrastructure engineering, platform engi