Platform Engineering Manager Jobs in California
Platform Engineering Manager jobs in California are among the most active in the country, concentrated in enterprise technology, cloud infrastructure, and developer productivity platforms, with openings at every level from lead engineer stepping into management through senior director. The largest hiring markets are San Francisco, San Jose, and Los Angeles, where companies like Google, Apple, and Salesforce maintain deep engineering organizations and consistently hire at this level. The most in-demand specialties in California are Kubernetes and container orchestration, internal developer platforms, and site reliability engineering at scale. Find a role that fits below and apply directly.
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Showing 5 of 126+ Platform Engineering Manager jobs
Responsibilities
The Data Platform team at the TikTok USDS Joint Venture operates TikTok's US data processing ecosystem: a full suite of big data services, hundreds of thousands of batch and streaming pipelines/tasks, resource optimization, compliance and guaranteed data production. We ensure pipelines produce high-quality production data reliably and on time to meet the need of all the major TikTok businesses lines - including TikTok, Live, eCommerce, while maintaining efficient resource utilization, workload isolation, and regulatory compliance.
About the Role: As an Engineering Manager on the Data Platform team, you will lead a team of data engineers and software engineers, create innovative solutions to scale operations, and own the reliable on-time delivery of large-scale data assets. Your team is the business's dependable delivery partner: our happy clients count on your service to produce data that are critical for business intelligence, application operations, and customer successes across multiple data centers. You will innovate with software, automation, and AI to do more with what we have — driving self-healing pipelines, AI-assisted reliability engineering and on-call, intelligent cost and resource optimization, and automation for data development, quality checks, and governance. You will collaborate closely with the internal Data foundation team, surfacing operational needs, co-defining roadmaps, and jointly turning platform capabilities into measurable reliability, efficiency, and productivity gains for your business line.
Responsibilities:
- Lead and grow the team: Manage, coach, and develop a team of data engineers. Foster a culture of ownership, operational excellence, engineering rigor, and a builder's mindset toward automation and AI.
- Own operational delivery for your business line: Take end-to-end accountability for the reliability, timeliness, and quality of batch and streaming pipelines, jobs, and data assets serving the business needs. Own SLAs, on-call health, incident response, and postmortem-driven improvement.
- Innovate with software, automation, and AI: Build or adopt tooling for AI-assisted SRE (triage, root-cause analysis, auto-remediation), self-healing and auto-tuning pipelines, LLM-powered data development and code review, automated data quality and lineage checks, and intelligent cost optimization. Turn repeated toil into products.
- Partner with the business: Act as the primary engineering point of contact for your business line's Product, Analytics, Data Science, and Engineering partners. Translate business priorities into a concrete data delivery and reliability roadmap; communicate trade-offs, risks, and dependencies clearly.
- Collaborate with the Data Foundation team: Co-shape data platform requirements, adopt new platform capabilities, and bring foundation capabilities to your business, and bring your business's realities to the foundation.
- Uphold governance and compliance: Ensure all pipelines, datasets, and tooling under your team meet data governance, privacy, security, and regulatory requirements applicable to the US data environment.
Qualifications
Minimum Qualifications
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 5+ years of experience building and operating enterprise-grade data platforms or large-scale distributed data systems, including 3+ years in an engineering leadership or engineering management role overseeing technical teams in a cross-functional, fast-paced environment.
- Hands-on experience operating production batch and streaming systems built on technologies such as Spark, Flink, Hadoop, Kafka, Druid, ClickHouse, or equivalents — including on-call ownership, SLA management, and incident response. Must have a builder mindset.
- Strong grasp of modern data architectures (data lakes, data warehouses, lakehouse patterns) and of what makes large-scale pipelines reliable, efficient, and observable.
- Demonstrated ability to improve throughput, reliability, or cost efficiency of a data system without linear headcount growth — through automation, tooling, or architectural change.
- Excellent communication, stakeholder management, and cross-functional partnership skills.
- Ability to balance strategic thinking with hands-on problem-solving.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience applying AI/LLM technologies to data operations — for example, AI-assisted SRE and observability, LLM-powered data development or code review, automated governance and cataloging, or intelligent cost optimization.
- Track record leading a business-embedded data engineering team that partners with Product, Analytics, and Data Science on a specific business line (e.g., e-commerce, live streaming, consumer social).
- Familiarity with data compliance and privacy requirements in a regulated environment (e.g., US data sovereignty, PII handling).
About USDS
TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is dedicated to the safety and security of millions of Americans who create, discover, and connect with what they love on the apps we operate. The Joint Venture has been established in compliance with the Executive Order signed by President Trump on September 25, 2025. Our foundation is a comprehensive data privacy and cybersecurity program we operate under defined safeguards to protect national security and secure U.S. user data, apps and the algorithm. We safeguard the U.S. content ecosystem, holding decision-making authority for trust and safety policies and moderation. USDS Joint Venture helps ensure Americans can continue to express their creativity, discover new hobbies and interests, and build thriving communities and businesses on a global scale.
On-site presence across teams allows the company to operate with greater speed, alignment, and agility — especially in areas like real-time decision-making, team development, and integrated execution. As such, the company is shifting from a hybrid work model to a fully in-person schedule up to 5 days a week.
Why Join Us
Inspiring creativity is at the core of TikTok's mission. Our innovative product is built to help people authentically express themselves, discover and connect – and our global, diverse teams make that possible. Together, we create value for our communities, inspire creativity and bring joy - a mission we work towards every day. We strive to do great things with great people. We lead with curiosity, humility, and a desire to make impact in a rapidly growing tech company. Every challenge is an opportunity to learn and innovate as one team. We're resilient and embrace challenges as they come. By constantly iterating and fostering an "Always Day 1" mindset, we achieve meaningful breakthroughs for ourselves, our company, and our users. When we create and grow together, the possibilities are limitless. Join us.
Diversity & Inclusion
TikTok is committed to creating an inclusive space where employees are valued for their skills, experiences, and unique perspectives. Our platform connects people from across the globe and so does our workplace. At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. To achieve that goal, we are committed to celebrating our diverse voices and to creating an environment that reflects the many communities we reach. We are passionate about this and hope you are too.
USDS Reasonable Accommodation
USDS is committed to providing reasonable accommodations in our recruitment processes for candidates with disabilities, pregnancy, sincerely held religious beliefs or other reasons protected by applicable laws. If you need assistance or a reasonable accommodation, please reach out to us at https://tinyurl.com/USDS-RA
Job Information
【For Pay Transparency】Compensation Description (Annually) The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $208800 - $438000 annually. Compensation may vary outside of this range depending on a number of factors, including a candidate’s qualifications, skills, competencies and experience, and location. Base pay is one part of the Total Package that is provided to compensate and recognize employees for their work, and this role may be eligible for additional discretionary bonuses/incentives, and restricted stock units.
Benefits may vary depending on the nature of employment and the country work location. Employees have day one access to medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k) savings plan with company match, paid parental leave, short-term and long-term disability coverage, life insurance, wellbeing benefits, among others. Employees also receive 10 paid holidays per year, 10 paid sick days per year and 17 days of Paid Personal Time (prorated upon hire with increasing accruals by tenure).
The Company reserves the right to modify or change these benefits programs at any time, with or without notice.
For Los Angeles County (unincorporated) Candidates: Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all federal, state, and local laws including the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act. Our company believes that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship on the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of the conditional offer of employment:
1. Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues;
2. Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems; and
3. Exercising sound judgment.
Responsibilities
The Data Platform team at the TikTok USDS Joint Venture operates TikTok's US data processing ecosystem: a full suite of big data services, hundreds of thousands of batch and streaming pipelines/tasks, resource optimization, compliance and guaranteed data production. We ensure pipelines produce high-quality production data reliably and on time to meet the need of all the major TikTok businesses lines - including TikTok, Live, eCommerce, while maintaining efficient resource utilization, workload isolation, and regulatory compliance.
About the Role: As an Engineering Manager on the Data Platform team, you will lead a team of data engineers and software engineers, create innovative solutions to scale operations, and own the reliable on-time delivery of large-scale data assets. Your team is the business's dependable delivery partner: our happy clients count on your service to produce data that are critical for business intelligence, application operations, and customer successes across multiple data centers. You will innovate with software, automation, and AI to do more with what we have — driving self-healing pipelines, AI-assisted reliability engineering and on-call, intelligent cost and resource optimization, and automation for data development, quality checks, and governance. You will collaborate closely with the internal Data foundation team, surfacing operational needs, co-defining roadmaps, and jointly turning platform capabilities into measurable reliability, efficiency, and productivity gains for your business line.
Responsibilities:
- Lead and grow the team: Manage, coach, and develop a team of data engineers. Foster a culture of ownership, operational excellence, engineering rigor, and a builder's mindset toward automation and AI.
- Own operational delivery for your business line: Take end-to-end accountability for the reliability, timeliness, and quality of batch and streaming pipelines, jobs, and data assets serving the business needs. Own SLAs, on-call health, incident response, and postmortem-driven improvement.
- Innovate with software, automation, and AI: Build or adopt tooling for AI-assisted SRE (triage, root-cause analysis, auto-remediation), self-healing and auto-tuning pipelines, LLM-powered data development and code review, automated data quality and lineage checks, and intelligent cost optimization. Turn repeated toil into products.
- Partner with the business: Act as the primary engineering point of contact for your business line's Product, Analytics, Data Science, and Engineering partners. Translate business priorities into a concrete data delivery and reliability roadmap; communicate trade-offs, risks, and dependencies clearly.
- Collaborate with the Data Foundation team: Co-shape data platform requirements, adopt new platform capabilities, and bring foundation capabilities to your business, and bring your business's realities to the foundation.
- Uphold governance and compliance: Ensure all pipelines, datasets, and tooling under your team meet data governance, privacy, security, and regulatory requirements applicable to the US data environment.
Qualifications
Minimum Qualifications
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 5+ years of experience building and operating enterprise-grade data platforms or large-scale distributed data systems, including 3+ years in an engineering leadership or engineering management role overseeing technical teams in a cross-functional, fast-paced environment.
- Hands-on experience operating production batch and streaming systems built on technologies such as Spark, Flink, Hadoop, Kafka, Druid, ClickHouse, or equivalents — including on-call ownership, SLA management, and incident response. Must have a builder mindset.
- Strong grasp of modern data architectures (data lakes, data warehouses, lakehouse patterns) and of what makes large-scale pipelines reliable, efficient, and observable.
- Demonstrated ability to improve throughput, reliability, or cost efficiency of a data system without linear headcount growth — through automation, tooling, or architectural change.
- Excellent communication, stakeholder management, and cross-functional partnership skills.
- Ability to balance strategic thinking with hands-on problem-solving.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience applying AI/LLM technologies to data operations — for example, AI-assisted SRE and observability, LLM-powered data development or code review, automated governance and cataloging, or intelligent cost optimization.
- Track record leading a business-embedded data engineering team that partners with Product, Analytics, and Data Science on a specific business line (e.g., e-commerce, live streaming, consumer social).
- Familiarity with data compliance and privacy requirements in a regulated environment (e.g., US data sovereignty, PII handling).
About USDS
TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is dedicated to the safety and security of millions of Americans who create, discover, and connect with what they love on the apps we operate. The Joint Venture has been established in compliance with the Executive Order signed by President Trump on September 25, 2025. Our foundation is a comprehensive data privacy and cybersecurity program we operate under defined safeguards to protect national security and secure U.S. user data, apps and the algorithm. We safeguard the U.S. content ecosystem, holding decision-making authority for trust and safety policies and moderation. USDS Joint Venture helps ensure Americans can continue to express their creativity, discover new hobbies and interests, and build thriving communities and businesses on a global scale.
On-site presence across teams allows the company to operate with greater speed, alignment, and agility — especially in areas like real-time decision-making, team development, and integrated execution. As such, the company is shifting from a hybrid work model to a fully in-person schedule up to 5 days a week.
Why Join Us
Inspiring creativity is at the core of TikTok's mission. Our innovative product is built to help people authentically express themselves, discover and connect – and our global, diverse teams make that possible. Together, we create value for our communities, inspire creativity and bring joy - a mission we work towards every day. We strive to do great things with great people. We lead with curiosity, humility, and a desire to make impact in a rapidly growing tech company. Every challenge is an opportunity to learn and innovate as one team. We're resilient and embrace challenges as they come. By constantly iterating and fostering an "Always Day 1" mindset, we achieve meaningful breakthroughs for ourselves, our company, and our users. When we create and grow together, the possibilities are limitless. Join us.
Diversity & Inclusion
TikTok is committed to creating an inclusive space where employees are valued for their skills, experiences, and unique perspectives. Our platform connects people from across the globe and so does our workplace. At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. To achieve that goal, we are committed to celebrating our diverse voices and to creating an environment that reflects the many communities we reach. We are passionate about this and hope you are too.
USDS Reasonable Accommodation
USDS is committed to providing reasonable accommodations in our recruitment processes for candidates with disabilities, pregnancy, sincerely held religious beliefs or other reasons protected by applicable laws. If you need assistance or a reasonable accommodation, please reach out to us at https://tinyurl.com/USDS-RA
Job Information
【For Pay Transparency】Compensation Description (Annually) The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $208800 - $438000 annually. Compensation may vary outside of this range depending on a number of factors, including a candidate’s qualifications, skills, competencies and experience, and location. Base pay is one part of the Total Package that is provided to compensate and recognize employees for their work, and this role may be eligible for additional discretionary bonuses/incentives, and restricted stock units.
Benefits may vary depending on the nature of employment and the country work location. Employees have day one access to medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k) savings plan with company match, paid parental leave, short-term and long-term disability coverage, life insurance, wellbeing benefits, among others. Employees also receive 10 paid holidays per year, 10 paid sick days per year and 17 days of Paid Personal Time (prorated upon hire with increasing accruals by tenure).
The Company reserves the right to modify or change these benefits programs at any time, with or without notice.
For Los Angeles County (unincorporated) Candidates: Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all federal, state, and local laws including the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act. Our company believes that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship on the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of the conditional offer of employment:
1. Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues;
2. Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems; and
3. Exercising sound judgment.
See All 126+ Platform Engineering Manager Jobs in California
Find roles in California that match your experience and apply in just a few clicks.
Find JobsPlatform Engineering Manager Jobs by City in California
Where California roles are concentrated, by current openings.
Platform Engineering Manager Job Market in California
A snapshot from current California openings, updated as new roles post.
Who's Hiring
- Apple14
- Google6
- NVIDIA4
- Visa3
- Intuit3
Top Industries Hiring
- Technology & Software
- Insurance
- Science & Research
What California Employers Look For
The qualifications that appear most often in platform engineering manager jobs across California.
- Bachelor's degree in computer science, software engineering, or a closely related technical field
- Five or more years of software engineering experience with at least two in a management role
- Hands-on experience designing and operating Kubernetes, container, or cloud-native infrastructure at scale
- Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional engineering teams across multiple California time zones or offices
- Proficiency with major cloud platforms such as AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure in production environments
- Experience building internal developer platforms or toolchains that improve engineering velocity organization-wide
Platform Engineering Manager Jobs in California: Frequently Asked Questions
How do you become a platform engineering manager in California?
Platform engineering manager roles in California do not require a state-issued license or board credential. The standard path is a bachelor's degree in computer science or a related engineering discipline, followed by several years as a software or infrastructure engineer, then a move into a technical lead or staff engineer role before transitioning into management. California employers, especially in the Bay Area and Los Angeles tech ecosystem, weigh hands-on cloud and platform experience heavily alongside demonstrated team leadership.
How much do platform engineering managers make in California?
Platform engineering managers in California earn a median of about $210,280 a year, based on May 2025 Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data, ranging from around $137,900 for the lowest 10% to over $296,130 for the top 10%. Pay rises with experience, specialty, and employer.
Which companies hire platform engineering managers in California?
Employers hiring platform engineering managers in California right now include Apple, Google, and NVIDIA, based on current listings on Migrate Mate as of November 2026. California's density of enterprise software, fintech, and hyperscale cloud companies means hiring at this level is consistent year-round across both public companies and well-funded private firms headquartered in the state.
Which California cities have the most platform engineering manager jobs?
The cities with the most platform engineering manager openings in California are San Francisco, San Jose, and Cupertino. The distribution reflects where California's largest technology employers are headquartered or maintain major engineering hubs, with the San Francisco Bay Area and greater Los Angeles corridor accounting for the majority of openings due to the concentration of enterprise software, cloud, and consumer technology companies operating there.
Are there remote platform engineering manager jobs in California?
Yes, and more than most fields. About 78% of platform engineering manager openings tied to California are remote or hybrid as of November 2026, reflecting how well-suited infrastructure and platform leadership work is to distributed collaboration. The parts of the role most commonly done remotely are strategic planning, vendor evaluation, and cross-team coordination, while some companies require on-site presence for production incident response or architecture reviews.
How can I get hired as a platform engineering manager in California with little or no experience?
The most realistic entry path is moving into a senior or staff individual contributor role at a California technology company before transitioning into management. Large California employers like Google, Apple, and Salesforce run structured engineering leadership development programs and regularly promote from within. Starting as a site reliability engineer, DevOps engineer, or infrastructure tech lead gives candidates direct exposure to platform work. Building a portfolio of internal tooling projects or contributing to open-source platform tooling strengthens a California application significantly.
Where can I find and apply to platform engineering manager jobs in California?
You can find and apply to platform engineering manager jobs in California on Migrate Mate, which lists current California openings updated in real time. Search the listings, find roles that fit your experience and location preferences, and apply directly through each listing.
See All 126+ Platform Engineering Manager Jobs in California
Find roles in California that match your experience and apply in just a few clicks.
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