Engineering Mgr - Platform

We are looking for an Engineering Manager to lead our Platform Services domain that encompass backend microservices, media asset management systems, DevOps and infrastructure, and the CMS interfaces that power TEGNA's digital product portfolio. In this role, you will own delivery outcomes, operational health, and team execution across the platform services teams that form the foundation of everything we build and operate.

This domain is the backbone of our centralized platform serving local news stations across web, mobile, and connected TV. You will partner closely with the rest of the engineering teams and product leadership to ensure our platform services are reliable, scalable, well documented, and evolving to meet both current delivery needs and long-term strategic goals.

This is a hybrid position based in Knoxville, TN, with regular collaboration across teams.

Responsibilities:

Domain Ownership and Execution

• Own delivery outcomes and operational health across backend microservices, MAM systems, infrastructure, and our CMS systems.
• Lead execution across multiple platform services teams, ensuring service reliability, API quality, and infrastructure stability
• Ensure consistent performance, availability, and scalability across cloud native services running in AWS and Azure
• Translate product and platform priorities into executable plans across platform services teams
• Balance feature delivery with operational stability, security posture, and technical debt reduction

People Leadership

• Directly manage the Platform Services Teams
• Coach Team Leads on execution, release ownership, and leadership effectiveness
• Ensure teams have clear ownership, priorities, and accountability
• Support career development and performance management for all direct reports
• Foster team health, engagement, and a culture aligned with TEGNA's guiding engineering principles

Delivery and Release Oversight

• Accountable for release outcomes across backend services, infrastructure changes, and CMS deployments
• Ensure teams follow shared release standards, rollout strategies, and post release validation practices
• Partner with Team Leads during release windows and post release monitoring
• Review service health metrics, error rates, latency trends, and incident patterns
• Ensure issues discovered after release are triaged and addressed quickly

Operational Excellence

• Act as an escalation point for platform service incidents, infrastructure degradations, and backend outages
• Partner with application teams during incidents that involve platform services
• Support incident response and post incident reviews for platform related problems
• Drive improvements in observability, alerting, and monitoring using tools such as New Relic
• Identify systemic reliability risks across services and infrastructure and prioritize remediation
• Own the strategy for optimizing observability data ingestion costs while maintaining visibility into system health

Product Partnership

• Serve as the primary engineering partner for Product leadership responsible for platform capabilities, backend services, and internal tooling
• Collaborate closely with Product on roadmap planning, providing engineering perspective on feasibility, sequencing, and technical readiness
• Advise product on tradeoffs between feature delivery, platform stability, and technical debt, ensuring the engineering perspective shapes what gets prioritized and when
• Bridge the gap between product vision and engineering reality, ensuring commitments are grounded in team capacity, platform