Platform Engineering Manager Jobs in San Francisco, CA
Platform Engineering Manager jobs in San Francisco are concentrated in SoMa, the Financial District, and Mission Bay, driven by demand from cloud infrastructure, fintech, and enterprise SaaS companies. Employers hiring right now include OpenAI, Airwallex, and Anthropic. Find a role that fits below and apply directly.
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Showing 5 of 41+ Platform Engineering Manager jobs
Your Impact at LILA
Lila is hiring a Director of Lab Platform Engineering to lead the team that builds and operates the hybrid on-premises and cloud infrastructure behind our automated labs. You will own the platform strategy for a fleet of distributed lab sites and lead the engineers who make new sites come online reliably and repeatably.
Lab Platform Engineering builds and supports the platforms and software that keep Lila's AI Science Factory™ running: bare metal clusters, cloud infrastructure, secure identity and secrets services, resilient storage, and the APIs and tooling that let scientists and engineers ship software to production. Every robot, instrument, and lab workflow depends on these systems.
This is a leadership role on a team being built now. You will grow the organization to 10 to 15 engineers, set multi-year technical direction, and partner with robotics, lab operations, research, and security leaders on what the platform needs to support next.
What You'll Be Building
- Build and lead a team of 10 to 15 engineers, including managers and tech leads. Hire, develop, and retain engineers at every level.
- Set multi-year technical vision and strategy for hybrid edge and cloud infrastructure across distributed lab sites.
- Own platform roadmap and delivery, shipping on a predictable cadence against commitments made to partner teams.
- Own fleet operations and reliability, including service levels, on-call, and incident response across sites.
- Own infrastructure budget, capacity planning, and vendor relationships.
- Partner cross-functionally with robotics, lab operations, research, and security, and communicate platform strategy and tradeoffs to executives.
- Raise the engineering bar through standards, review practices, and technical thought leadership.
What You'll Need to Succeed
- 15+ years in software or infrastructure engineering, with 8+ years leading teams, including managing managers or tech leads, or equivalent practical experience.
- Track record building and scaling a platform or infrastructure organization from a small team upward.
- Deep technical grounding in hybrid on-premises and cloud infrastructure, including Kubernetes operated at scale outside the public cloud.
- Experience operating production fleets against explicit reliability targets, with ownership of on-call and incident practice.
- Ownership of infrastructure budget, capacity planning, and vendor negotiation.
- Proven cross-functional and executive partnership, including communicating technical tradeoffs to non-engineering leaders.
- Demonstrated ability to hire and develop senior and principal-level engineers.
Bonus Points For
- Scientific domain: laboratory automation, robotics, or hardware-adjacent platforms; lab software for life sciences or materials science.
- Distributed and edge systems: multi-site operations, intermittently connected environments, over-the-air software rollout.
- Security and compliance: identity and secrets management across hybrid environments, operating in regulated or audited settings.
- Platform practice: infrastructure-as-code, GitOps, developer experience as a product, AI-assisted engineering workflows adopted across a team.
- Organizational: standing up a new function, integrating acquired or transferred teams, managing a team split across offices and remote.
About LILA
Lila Sciences is building Scientific Superintelligence™ to solve humankind's greatest challenges. We believe science is the most inspiring frontier for AI. Rather than hard-coding expert knowledge into tools, LILA builds systems that can learn for themselves.
LILA combines advanced AI models with proprietary AI Science Factory™ instruments into an operating system for science that executes the entire scientific method autonomously, accelerating discovery at unprecedented speed, scale, and impact across medicine, materials, and energy. Learn more at www.lila.ai.
Guided by our core values of truth, trust, curiosity, grit, and velocity, we move with startup speed while tackling problems of historic importance. If this sounds like an environment you'd love to work in, even if you don't meet every qualification listed above, we encourage you to apply.
We're All In
Lila Sciences is committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status.
Information you provide during your application process will be handled in accordance with our Candidate Privacy Policy.
A Note to Agencies
Lila Sciences does not accept unsolicited resumes from any source other than candidates. The submission of unsolicited resumes by recruitment or staffing agencies to Lila Sciences or its employees is strictly prohibited unless contacted directly by Lila Science's internal Talent Acquisition team. Any resume submitted by an agency in the absence of a signed agreement will automatically become the property of Lila Sciences, and Lila Sciences will not owe any referral or other fees with respect thereto.
Your Impact at LILA
Lila is hiring a Director of Lab Platform Engineering to lead the team that builds and operates the hybrid on-premises and cloud infrastructure behind our automated labs. You will own the platform strategy for a fleet of distributed lab sites and lead the engineers who make new sites come online reliably and repeatably.
Lab Platform Engineering builds and supports the platforms and software that keep Lila's AI Science Factory™ running: bare metal clusters, cloud infrastructure, secure identity and secrets services, resilient storage, and the APIs and tooling that let scientists and engineers ship software to production. Every robot, instrument, and lab workflow depends on these systems.
This is a leadership role on a team being built now. You will grow the organization to 10 to 15 engineers, set multi-year technical direction, and partner with robotics, lab operations, research, and security leaders on what the platform needs to support next.
What You'll Be Building
- Build and lead a team of 10 to 15 engineers, including managers and tech leads. Hire, develop, and retain engineers at every level.
- Set multi-year technical vision and strategy for hybrid edge and cloud infrastructure across distributed lab sites.
- Own platform roadmap and delivery, shipping on a predictable cadence against commitments made to partner teams.
- Own fleet operations and reliability, including service levels, on-call, and incident response across sites.
- Own infrastructure budget, capacity planning, and vendor relationships.
- Partner cross-functionally with robotics, lab operations, research, and security, and communicate platform strategy and tradeoffs to executives.
- Raise the engineering bar through standards, review practices, and technical thought leadership.
What You'll Need to Succeed
- 15+ years in software or infrastructure engineering, with 8+ years leading teams, including managing managers or tech leads, or equivalent practical experience.
- Track record building and scaling a platform or infrastructure organization from a small team upward.
- Deep technical grounding in hybrid on-premises and cloud infrastructure, including Kubernetes operated at scale outside the public cloud.
- Experience operating production fleets against explicit reliability targets, with ownership of on-call and incident practice.
- Ownership of infrastructure budget, capacity planning, and vendor negotiation.
- Proven cross-functional and executive partnership, including communicating technical tradeoffs to non-engineering leaders.
- Demonstrated ability to hire and develop senior and principal-level engineers.
Bonus Points For
- Scientific domain: laboratory automation, robotics, or hardware-adjacent platforms; lab software for life sciences or materials science.
- Distributed and edge systems: multi-site operations, intermittently connected environments, over-the-air software rollout.
- Security and compliance: identity and secrets management across hybrid environments, operating in regulated or audited settings.
- Platform practice: infrastructure-as-code, GitOps, developer experience as a product, AI-assisted engineering workflows adopted across a team.
- Organizational: standing up a new function, integrating acquired or transferred teams, managing a team split across offices and remote.
About LILA
Lila Sciences is building Scientific Superintelligence™ to solve humankind's greatest challenges. We believe science is the most inspiring frontier for AI. Rather than hard-coding expert knowledge into tools, LILA builds systems that can learn for themselves.
LILA combines advanced AI models with proprietary AI Science Factory™ instruments into an operating system for science that executes the entire scientific method autonomously, accelerating discovery at unprecedented speed, scale, and impact across medicine, materials, and energy. Learn more at www.lila.ai.
Guided by our core values of truth, trust, curiosity, grit, and velocity, we move with startup speed while tackling problems of historic importance. If this sounds like an environment you'd love to work in, even if you don't meet every qualification listed above, we encourage you to apply.
We're All In
Lila Sciences is committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status.
Information you provide during your application process will be handled in accordance with our Candidate Privacy Policy.
A Note to Agencies
Lila Sciences does not accept unsolicited resumes from any source other than candidates. The submission of unsolicited resumes by recruitment or staffing agencies to Lila Sciences or its employees is strictly prohibited unless contacted directly by Lila Science's internal Talent Acquisition team. Any resume submitted by an agency in the absence of a signed agreement will automatically become the property of Lila Sciences, and Lila Sciences will not owe any referral or other fees with respect thereto.
See All 41 Platform Engineering Manager Jobs in San Francisco
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Who's Hiring
Top Industries Hiring
- Technology & Software
- Science & Research
Platform Engineering Manager Jobs in San Francisco: Frequently Asked Questions
How do I get a platform engineering manager job in San Francisco?
The strongest path is targeting San Francisco's dense cluster of cloud-native startups and established tech companies in SoMa, Mission Bay, and the Financial District. Employers here prioritize hands-on experience with Kubernetes, Terraform, and CI/CD pipelines alongside a history of leading distributed engineering teams. Candidates who can point to measurable reliability or deployment improvements, and who have worked in high-growth or regulated environments like fintech or healthtech, move to the top of shortlists fastest.
Which companies hire platform engineering managers in San Francisco?
Employers hiring platform engineering managers in San Francisco right now include OpenAI, Airwallex, and Anthropic, based on current listings on Migrate Mate as of November 2026. San Francisco's hiring mix skews heavily toward Series B through public-stage tech companies alongside a smaller set of financial services and healthcare technology firms with large engineering organizations.
Are there remote platform engineering manager jobs in San Francisco?
Yes, though the role is moderately remote-friendly since it often requires hands-on coordination with on-site infrastructure teams. About 71% of platform engineering manager openings tied to San Francisco are remote or hybrid as of November 2026, with hybrid arrangements being the more common offer. Strategic and planning responsibilities tend to be the most location-flexible, while incident response and team mentorship typically require regular in-office presence.
How can I get a platform engineering manager job in San Francisco with little or no experience?
The most realistic entry path is moving laterally from a senior software engineer or site reliability engineer role into a team lead or staff engineer position at a San Francisco startup, then stepping into platform management from there. Early-stage companies in SoMa and Mission Bay frequently promote strong individual contributors before formalizing the role. Building a portfolio of infrastructure projects on GitHub, contributing to open-source platform tooling, and engaging with San Francisco engineering communities through local meetups can accelerate that transition.
Which industries hire the most platform engineering managers in San Francisco?
San Francisco platform engineering manager roles concentrate in Technology & Software and Science & Research, based on current listings on Migrate Mate as of November 2026. San Francisco's position as the center of cloud infrastructure investment and venture-backed software development means these sectors generate a disproportionate share of platform leadership openings compared to most other U.S. cities.
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