Sr. Engineering Manager, Developer Productivity

Redpanda is the first runtime and control plane for agent-data interaction — a unified platform that combines streaming, SQL analytics, and intelligent connectivity with the governance layer enterprise AI agents need in production.

Built on infrastructure already trusted by Fortune 500 companies and fast-growing startups, Redpanda enforces governance entirely outside the agent's data path, controlling what agents see, limiting what they do, and capturing a tamper-proof record of everything they touch, so organizations never have to choose between innovation and control.

About the Role:

Developer Productivity, Quality Engineering, and Observability are the foundation everything else at Redpanda is built on. This organization owns the CI/CD pipelines and release infrastructure that every engineer depends on daily, the artifact and package registries that ship our software to customers, the scale and chaos testing frameworks that give us confidence our distributed systems hold up under real-world failure conditions, and the in-house observability platform (metrics, logs, and traces) that Core, Cloud, and every other engineering team relies on to understand system behavior in production. This is also a team that eats its own dog food on AI-assisted engineering — from on-call triage agents to AI-driven test and cost analysis — and is expected to keep pushing on what that looks like.

We are looking for an experienced Senior Engineering Manager to lead this combined charter: Developer Productivity, Quality Engineering, and our in-house Observability platform. This is a builder-and-operator role — you will own the roadmap and the on-call reality for the systems that keep the rest of engineering fast, confident, and informed.

This is a hybrid role based in our central Warsaw office, with a minimum of 3 days a week on-site.

You are:

• Passionate about developer experience, platform reliability, and the leverage that great internal tooling creates for an entire engineering org

• Excited to roll up your sleeves and do what it takes to deliver objective results

• Eager to thrive with the thrill and ethos of a fast growing startup

• Accountable, bring a sense of ownership, and are self-driven

You have:

• 10+ years of experience in software development and delivery

• 5+ years of experience managing software developers

• Experience leading or managing teams responsible for developer tooling, CI/CD, release engineering, quality/test infrastructure, or observability platforms

• Experience developing a strategy and roadmap spanning multiple adjacent charters, and the judgment to sequence and prioritize across them

• An entrepreneurial spirit - as we expect each team in Redpanda to organize themselves like a startup

• Strong verbal and written communication skills and demonstrated technical leadership

• Previous experience growing a team to 15+ people

• Working familiarity with distributed systems and cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, and/or Azure), and enough technical depth to be credible with engineers building CI/CD, test frameworks, and metrics/logs/tracing pipelines

• Comfortable working with a globally distributed engineering team, collaborating on GitHub, in the open, and a self starter

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills

You will:

Set Strategy and Direction:

• Develop a multi-year strategy and near-term roadmap across Developer Productivity, Quality Engineering, and Observability.

• Sequence investments across competing needs such as CI performance, platform reliability, testing confidence, telemetry quality, and operational cost.

• Define measurable outcomes and communicate progress, risks, tradeoffs, and contingency plans to engineering leadership.

• Establish clear ownership boundaries and operating agreements across adjacent teams.

Lead Platform Execution and Operations:

• Oversee the reliability, scalability, and security of CI/CD, release, artifact, testing, and observability platforms.

• Ensure that teams have appropriate service-level objectives, runbooks, escalation paths, and disaster-recovery plans.

• Balance roadmap delivery with operational work, incidents, maintenance, and technical debt.

• Participate in incident response and operational reviews.

• Improve the sustainability of on-call, support, and service-ownership practices.

Lead the Organization:

• Build a high-performing team with clear ownership, effective collaboration, and strong technical standards.

• Hire, onboard, coach, and retain engineers and engineering leaders.

• Provide clear and actionable feedback.

• Support career development and succession planning.

• Address performance issues directly and fairly.

• Create an environment where engineers can make decisions, learn from failures, and understand the impact of their work.

Improve Developer and Engineering Outcomes:

• Reduce friction in local development, CI, testing, and release workflows.

• Improve feedback speed and signal quality without sacrificing confidence.

• Make quality and observability capabilities easy for engineering teams to adopt.

• Use developer feedback, operational data, and platform metrics to guide improvements.

• Evaluate AI-assisted engineering workflows with appropriate controls, measurement, and human oversight.

Kindly highlight if applicable to you:

• Experience running or scaling an internal observability stack (e.g. Prometheus/Mimir, Loki, Grafana, Tempo, or equivalent) at production scale

• Experience building or operating chaos/fault-injection or large-scale load testing frameworks for distributed systems

• Experience with artifact/package registry migrations or supply-chain tooling (e.g. moving off a third-party registry to self-hosted or cloud-native infrastructure)

• Experience applying AI-assisted tooling (e.g. LLM-based agents) to developer workflows, on-call triage, or test/cost analysis

• Previous experience managing people managers

Join Redpanda if you’d enjoy being part of a fast-moving, diverse, people-first organization with team members around the globe and a culture based on trust, transparency, communication, and kindness. You'll dive into a nimble, high-impact team with the latest AI tools — and the budget to actually use them.

Department: Engineering