Platform Engineering Manager

Summary

The Platform Engineering Manager provides people and delivery leadership for Learnosity's Platform team. Based in Australia and reporting to the SVP of Technology, the role gives local leadership to a distributed team with engineers across Australia and Dublin. Its objective is to give the team clear management and delivery ownership.

The role is accountable for building a team that reliably delivers platform improvements, supports engineering teams and works effectively with CloudOps. It acts as the technical product owner for the platform, owning the backlog, priorities and delivery, and translating the SVP of Technology strategy into a clear, prioritised platform roadmap. The SVP of Technology remains accountable for the overall technology strategy and delegates day-to-day technology decision making within the platform to this role: the manager makes the final call and breaks ties so decisions are resolved, documented and aligned to the wider strategy, while technical leads (Staff Engineers) and experienced engineers own technical design, architecture and implementation as the team's deepest technical expertise.

Requirements

Key Responsibilities

• People leadership: leads the Platform engineers day to day: regular 1:1s, performance and career development, team health and engagement, capacity and workload, hiring and onboarding, and addressing performance or behavioural issues.
• Delivery and backlog ownership: owns the Platform backlog as its product owner. Ensures work is prioritised, scoped, owned, visible across locations and time zones, and delivered against agreed outcomes; manages dependencies and trade-offs across projects, operational work and technical maintenance.
• Platform direction and technology decisions: translates the SVP of Technology’s strategy into a prioritised roadmap (infrastructure automation, CI/CD, developer enablement, shared tooling, release safety, reliability and reducing manual work); with authority delegated by the SVP, makes the final call on platform technology choices and breaks ties so decisions are made, documented and aligned.
• Partnership with CloudOps: involves CloudOps early and agrees operational requirements: monitoring and alerting, recovery, support expectations, access, runbooks, and handover and acceptance criteria, so work is operationally ready rather than handed over at the end.
• Stakeholder management: represents the Platform team with Engineering, Product and other stakeholders, communicating priorities, progress, risks, dependencies and escalations; ensures incoming work is refined and prioritised.
• Standards and ways of working: ensures consistent engineering standards and effective, quality delivery practices across a distributed team, and fosters a culture of collaboration within Platform, with CloudOps and across the wider business.

Skills and Experience

Required

• 7-10 years of engineering experience, including 2-3 years leading or managing engineers.
• Experience leading distributed teams across multiple locations and time zones.
• Ownership of a delivery backlog and roadmap: prioritisation, scoping, and translating strategy into a plan (platform-as-a-product or internal developer platforms).
• Decisive technical judgement: able to resolve competing technical opinions and make the final call to keep work moving, while relying on technical experts for design.
• A collaborative, consultative leadership style, and proven ability to coach, grow and manage the performance of engineers.
• Strong communication and stakeholder management across technical and non-technical audiences.
• Strong platform or infrastructure engineering background: deep, hands-on AWS (EC2, ECS, RDS, networking), containerised environments (Docker / ECS) and observability (Datadog, CloudWatch).
• Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD (CloudFormation, Troposphere or Terraform; GitHub Actions or Jenkins), with strong Python for automation and platform tooling.

Nice to Have

• SaltStack or similar configuration management.
• Experience modernising platforms and implementing stack changes where they add clear value, applied pragmatically rather than change for its own sake.
• Experience with large-scale data: handling high data volumes, and data storage, retention and scaling.
• SaaS experience.
• Exposure to FinOps / cloud cost optimisation.
• Experience enabling AI-assisted or agentic software delivery.

Key Behaviours

• Ownership: takes accountability for the team's outcomes; unblocks and empowers rather than micromanaging.
• Decision Making: gathers input from Staff and Senior engineers and key stakeholders, then makes timely, well-reasoned calls; breaks ties and ensures decisions are made and documented so work is not left parked, and brings people along by explaining the reasoning so decisions are understood and adopted.
• Collaboration: builds trust and strong working relationships across Platform, CloudOps and the wider organisation; leads by example.
• Communication: shares context proactively, tailors the message to the audience, and listens to understand.
• Curiosity and pragmatism: balances modernisation ambition with the realities of reliability and delivery.
• Product mindset: outcome-oriented, with empathy for the developer-as-customer; decides what not to do as much as what to do.

Benefits

Our Values

We are a values-driven company, and how we work matters as much as what we build:

• We live to learn
• We aim higher
• We do the right thing
• Our success is better shared

Benefits

• Annual Leave
• Milestone Leave
• Paid sick leave
• Generous parental leave
• Health & dental insurance
• Pension contributions
• Learning & development support
• Employee Assistance Program
• Flexible work practices
• Commuter benefits
• Modern office

Location & Working Style

Our team is based in Sydney, NSW. We value the balance between flexibility and the energy of in-person collaboration, and encourage regular collaboration in our CBD office.

At Learnosity, we are committed to fostering a diverse, inclusive, and equitable workplace where all employees feel valued and empowered. We believe that diversity of thought, background, and experience drives innovation and enriches our community. As a tech company in the education space, we are dedicated to creating educational solutions that reflect the diverse needs of our global audience.

Find out more about your career at Learnosity at learnosity.com/careers/

Please see our Recruitment Privacy Policy

Salary & package dependent on experience.

Please only contact us if you are a candidate interested in applying for this role. You must have the right to live and work in Australia to apply.