Engineering Manager - Platform

Join Vonage and help us innovate cloud communications for businesses worldwide! Vonage Communications APIs: As an emerging leader in the $10B+ communications API market, we empower global brands to connect better with their customers, employees, and partners through transformative communications experiences. For example, Vonage API solutions empower organizations to build their custom omnichannel communications structure. This allows them to reach and engage customers on their preferred schedule and channel — including voice, video, and messaging. Think of a rideshare service instantly connecting with customers, hospital staff conducting remote monitoring, customers verifying their identity before completing a purchase, AI virtual agents servicing customers around the clock, and much more. As businesses continue to shift to a real-time, customer-centric communications model, we are experiencing a time of impressive growth. Why this role matters Platform engineering sits at the heart of how software gets built at scale, and this team will help define how Vonage works. You will lead a group of engineers who are directly responsible for the platforms, workflows, and automation that the wider engineering organisation depends on every day. The organisation is going through a meaningful platform evolution: modernising tooling, raising the automation ceiling, and standardising how engineering teams ship software at scale. There is real work to do, real complexity to navigate, and a real mandate to make things better. This is a role for an engineering manager who wants to lead through change as Vonage continues to drive innovation. You will lead a globally distributed engineering team focused on growing engineers and delivering in a complex, high-stakes environment where your work is felt every day. This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will be expected to write and review production code, contribute to architecture decisions, and participate directly in the on-call rotation — not only manage others who do those things. Your key responsibilities • Lead the EU/US Platform Engineering team – Provide day-to-day people management and technical leadership for a geographically distributed team of platform engineers. • Stay hands-on technically – Write and review production code, contribute to technical and architecture decisions, and work directly with the team on complex engineering challenges. • Drive the roadmap forward – Execute the roadmap under the direction of the Director of Engineering and Product Owner, ensuring deliverables are not blocked by external dependencies. • Develop your people – Team members are transitioning from SRE/infrastructure backgrounds into platform product engineering; you will coach and grow them toward ownership, customer-first thinking, and modern platform development practices. • Coordinate large-scale cross-team changes – Own the coordination of platform-wide changes such as Kubernetes upgrades, tooling migrations, and security hardening that touch many teams and require alignment across multiple stakeholders and time zones. • Operate within compliance and security constraints – Ensure all platform work meets security and regulatory requirements while maintaining appropriate guardrails and policies. • Be data-driven – Establish and track SLAs, error budgets, KPIs, and change failure rates; use metrics to prioritise work, communicate platform health to stakeholders, and continuously improve the team's delivery velocity. • Maintain platform reliability – Participate directly in the on-call rotation with your team and set the standard for operational excellence, incident response, and production ownership. • Partner with architects and product – Work closely with the Chief Architect (US-based), Director of Engineering, and Product Owner on platform direction, architecture, and prioritisation. What you'll bring Required • 2+ years of engineering management experience leading platform, DevOps, or SRE teams. • A strong hands-on engineering background before moving into management – You have personally written and shipped production code, owned systems end-to-end, and debugged production issues. • Strong hands-on experience with Kubernetes-based platforms (EKS preferred), including cluster lifecycle management, upgrades at scale, operational troubleshooting, and cross-team rollout coordination. • Strong hands-on experience with the AWS ecosystem and a solid understanding of how AWS services underpin enterprise platform infrastructure. • Proven ability to lead and grow engineers through skill transitions, especially from operational/SRE roles into product-oriented platform engineering. • A genuine dependency-unblocking mindset – You know how to drive cross-team commitments, escalate constructively, and keep complex multi-team deliverables on track. • A data-driven approach to platform management – You are comfortable defining and tracking SLAs, KPIs, change failure rates, and error budgets. • Familiarity with compliance and security constraints in a regulated environment – You do not treat them as blockers but as guardrails to engineer around. • Strong leadership instincts – You set a high bar, give clear feedback, and build psychological safety. Nice to have • Hands-on experience with Port.io, OpsLevel, or a similar Internal Developer Platform product. • Familiarity with GitOps tooling such as ArgoCD, Crossplane, or Kyverno. • AWS and/or Kubernetes certifications. • Experience in CFIUS-regulated or similarly complex compliance environments. How you’ll benefit: • Private Medical Insurance with the option to add dependents • Multisport Gym Membership • Educational Assistance Reimbursement Program • Lunch and Learn Sessions held monthly • Opportunity to be reimbursed for conferences, trainings, and other events consistent with the area of work aimed at personal development • Three Paid Volunteer Days a Y