Control Plane - Serverless Core - Software Engineering Manager

What is The Role

The Control Plane Serverless Team builds and maintains the platform that allows Elastic’s products and customers to enjoy a flawless experience. We focus on abstracting away the complexities of the underlying environment so our users can focus on what matters most to them. Our team is responsible for the critical services and domains—like Kubernetes controllers and internal APIs—that orchestrate global deployments. We are builders at heart!

Are you a leader who is a manager first, but still loves to dive into the technical details of distributed systems? We seek an Engineering Manager to guide a team that is responsible for a key portion of our Serverless Control Plane. We need someone who can truly understand the "how" and "why" of the work to ensure our services remain robust as we scale together.

We are a distributed team, with about half of us based in Europe. To make sure we have enough time to collaborate in real-time, we are looking for teammates in EMEA or the Americas. If you’re in the Americas, we have a preference for the Eastern Timezone (EST) so we can maintain that "golden window" of collaboration with our European colleagues.

What You Will Be Doing

• People & Talent Management: We believe in leading and empowering our people. You will mentor a team of versatile software engineers, encouraging a culture that is committed to performance, psychological safety, and continuous learning! You will be responsible for the entire employee lifecycle, from your first hire to helping your team members reach their next promotion.
• Strategy & Execution: How do we turn big ideas into reality? You’ll work with our Product and Control Plane Leadership teams to navigate planning cycles, working together to translate business requirements into clear engineering achievements. You’ll act as a bridge, ensuring our APIs and services meet the needs of our internal customers while we maintain the integrity of the platform.
• Technical & Operational Leadership: We take full accountability for our services. You’ll partner with your Technical Lead to facilitate technical discussions, navigate trade-offs, and drive the team to build balanced, high-quality services. You will also be part of our Incident Commander (IC) on-call rotation, providing leadership during critical service disruptions to keep our platform production-ready.

What You Bring

• Management Experience: 2+ years of experience leading people, with a focus on mentoring and talent development.
• Technical Foundation: A background in Software Engineering, SRE, or DevOps that allows you to read code and guide senior engineers through problems.
• Golang Proficiency: While you will not be shipping code to production, familiarity with Golang patterns and software engineering best practises is important to us, as our entire part of the stack is built on it.
• Strategic Approach: Experience helping a team plan its roadmap and forecast capacity in a fast paced environment.
• Distributed Leadership: Experience leading remote, asynchronous teams across different time zones and countries.
• Communication: A knack for explaining technical strategy and progress to all kinds of interested parties, whether they are technical or not.

Bonus Points

• Elastic Stack Expertise: Prior experience with Elasticsearch, Kibana, or deployment models like ECK and ECE.
• Cloud-Native Depth: