Platform Engineering Manager Jobs in California

INTRODUCTION

Aerospike is the real-time database for mission-critical workloads, including machine learning, generative AI, and agentic AI. Aerospike powers millions of transactions per second with millisecond latency, at a fraction of the total cost of ownership compared to other databases. Global leaders rely on Aerospike for fraud detection, customer 360, recommendation engines, real-time bidding, and other demanding use cases.

At Aerospike, we dream big and deliver even bigger. Our mission is to unleash the power of the world’s real-time data with a database built for infinite scale, speed, and sustainability. If you’re ready to shape the future of data, join us.

We’re looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to lead a team building the Aerospike Cloud Platform — our multi-cloud, multi-tenant offering that brings the power of Aerospike to developers everywhere.

This is a hands-on leadership role: you’ll guide and grow a team of frontend and backend engineers while staying close to architecture, product decisions, and execution. You’ll partner closely with product, design, and backend teams to deliver performant, reliable, and intuitive user experiences at scale.

What You’ll Do

- Lead, coach, and grow a team of frontend and backend engineers, creating a high-performing and inclusive team environment
- Drive execution against the platform technical roadmap, ensuring clarity, prioritization, and consistent delivery
- Partner with product and design to translate business needs into clear technical plans and high-quality user experiences in both a UI and API
- Stay close to the code: contribute to architecture, unblock engineers, and raise the technical bar across the team
- Own the control plane architecture for the Cloud Platform, with a focus on performance, scalability, and reliability
- Collaborate with other engineering teams to define and evolve APIs and services and deliver their product services on your platform
- Ensure strong engineering practices: testing, observability, CI/CD, and operational excellence
- Establish and track meaningful product and user experience metrics
- Support production systems, including participating in on-call rotations when needed
- Hire and develop top engineering talent, and build a culture of mentorship and continuous improvement

What We’re Looking For

- 5–10+ years of experience building and shipping customer-facing applications
- 1–3+ years of experience leading or managing engineers (formal or informal leadership)
- Strong hands-on experience with a broad but not exhaustive set of modern microservice technologies (Kubernetes, Go, OpenAPI, Temporal, React, etc.)
- Proven ability to deliver high-quality customer services in production environments
- Experience translating product requirements into scalable technical solutions
- Solid understanding of performance, security, and scalability in microservice ecosystems
- Experience working with at least one cloud platform (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
- Familiarity with API design and integration
- Strong communication skills and ability to work cross-functionally
- Experience supporting production systems and on-call in a 24x7x365 environment

Nice to Have

- Experience building and operating distributed systems (Docker, Kubernetes, etc.)
- Familiarity with CI/CD systems (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, etc.)
- Experience with observability tools (Datadog or similar)
- Experience working with NoSQL databases

Why This Role

This is an opportunity to step into a true ownership role — shaping both the product experience and the team that builds it. You’ll have a direct impact on how developers interact with Aerospike in the cloud, while helping grow a strong, thoughtful engineering culture.

Aerospike is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to providing an environment free from discrimination on the basis of race, religion, color, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, non-disqualifying physical or mental disability, national origin, veteran