Engineering Manager

Position Summary:

Swiftly is searching for a Manager of Infrastructure Engineering to lead a small infrastructure team responsible for operating and modernizing our production platform. This is a hands-on player-coach role with an approximately 50/50 split between individual technical contribution and people management. In practice, this role will personally execute important infrastructure initiatives while also setting direction, coaching engineers, and ensuring strong team delivery. The manager will help complete our remaining infrastructure modernization, improve reliability and developer experience, and contribute directly to the technical work required to move key initiatives forward. We are a fast-moving startup, so this role requires strong pragmatic judgment. The right leader can distinguish urgent production risks from important but deferrable improvements, balance reliability and security with engineering capacity and business priorities, and create appropriate guardrails without unnecessarily slowing down development.

The manager will partner closely with engineering, security, compliance, and other technical leaders. Success in this role comes from delivering infrastructure outcomes, creating clarity, and reducing operational and coordination overhead for the broader engineering organization. As an AI-native company, we expect engineering leaders to use AI tooling effectively to accelerate delivery and reduce operational toil.

Strong preference for candidates based in Pacific to Central time zones to support real-time collaboration with our core team.

Responsibilities Include:

• Balance approximately 50% hands-on individual contribution with 50% people management, directly delivering infrastructure work while leading and developing a small Infrastructure Engineering team
• Own the reliability and modernization of Swiftly's production infrastructure, including our Kubernetes-based platform on Azure and the remaining migration away from legacy infrastructure
• Act as a true player-coach, personally driving important infrastructure initiatives through implementation and completion while also setting priorities, coaching engineers, and creating clear accountability
• Make pragmatic infrastructure decisions based on business impact, balancing reliability, security, technical debt, engineering capacity, and product priorities in a fast-moving startup environment
• Partner effectively with engineering, security, compliance, and other stakeholders to deliver the infrastructure work needed by the business while keeping ownership boundaries and next steps clear
• Champion AI-native engineering practices on the team, including the adoption of AI coding assistants and AI-assisted operations to accelerate delivery and reduce toil
• Other related duties as assigned

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field
• 7+ years of experience in infrastructure, platform, SRE, or software engineering, including 2+ years managing engineers
• Recent hands-on experience operating production Kubernetes environments in Azure or a comparable public cloud
• Strong hands-on experience with infrastructure-as-code and modern CI/CD practices, including Argo, Terraform and GitHub-based deployment workflows
• Experience leading meaningful infrastructure modernization, migration, reliability, or operational improvement initiatives through completion
• Demonstrated ability to lead and develop engineers while maintaining a substantial hands-on technical contribution, ideally in a role split approximately evenly between individual contributor work and people management
• Strong judgment in ambiguous, fast-moving environments, with the ability to balance reliability, security, technical debt, engineering capacity, and business priorities
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, including the ability to work with others remotely and effectively across engineering teams and turn technical concerns into clear, actionable recommendations
• Hands-on fluency with modern AI development tooling (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot) and a track record of using AI to increase engineering throughput
• Ability to thrive in an ambiguous, fast-paced environment, manage competing priorities, and make sound pragmatic calls
• This position is not eligible for visa sponsorship. Applicants must be authorized to work in the U.S. without the need for current or future sponsorship

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience operating infrastructure on Azure, particularly AKS and other cloud-native platform services
• Familiarity with Swiftly's infrastructure tooling and patterns, such as ArgoCD, HashiCorp Vault, Grafana, and PostgreSQL
• Experience partnering with security and compliance teams to implement infrastructure controls for programs such as SOC 2 or ISO 27001
• Experience using AI-assisted development and operations tooling to improve engineering productivity and reduce operational toil