Senior Manager, Cloud Infrastructure

UJET is looking for a Senior Manager to join our growing team in Austin, TX, Los Angeles, CA, or Portland, ME.  This role leads the team responsible for the production GCP and Kubernetes infrastructure powering our cloud-native SaaS platform.

The Cloud Infrastructure team owns the cloud environment that powers our products, including GCP architecture, networking, Kubernetes infrastructure, infrastructure provisioning, observability foundations, IAM and secrets, infrastructure security primitives, and cloud cost optimization.

As Senior Manager, Cloud Infrastructure, you will lead experienced infrastructure engineers, set technical strategy and execution priorities, and own the reliability, security, scalability, and cost efficiency of our underlying cloud environment. You will turn complex infrastructure challenges into clear plans, safe changes, and measurable outcomes.

This is a technical engineering leadership role for someone who has personally built, operated, and troubleshot production cloud infrastructure, including Kubernetes clusters, not just deployed applications into existing clusters. You will not implement every Terraform module or resolve every incident yourself, but you must have the depth to guide senior and staff engineers, question designs, and lead decisions during complex infrastructure failures.

• Hire, coach, develop, and retain a high-performing team of senior and staff infrastructure engineers; set clear priorities, ownership, expectations, and delivery accountability.
• Own the strategy and evolution of the cloud environment, including GCP architecture, networking, Kubernetes infrastructure, infrastructure provisioning, and shared infrastructure services.
• Provide technical direction for GCP organization and project architecture, shared networking, VPCs, subnets, firewall rules, routing, Cloud NAT, Cloud DNS, load balancing, IAM, and service connectivity.
• Own the technical strategy and operational standards for production Kubernetes/GKE clusters, including provisioning, control-plane and node lifecycle, networking, scheduling, autoscaling, capacity, upgrades, and cluster-level troubleshooting.
• Set engineering standards for Terraform modules, remote state, Git-based reviews, automated validation, infrastructure provisioning, change safety, and reusable infrastructure patterns.
• Establish and evolve infrastructure security foundations including IAM, service accounts, secrets management, network controls, and other cloud security primitives.
• Ensure teams have strong foundational observability capabilities, including metrics, logging, tracing, and infrastructure monitoring.
• Drive cloud cost efficiency through architecture, capacity planning, resource optimization, and visibility into infrastructure spend.
• Lead major GKE, Kubernetes, networking, and cloud infrastructure upgrades or migrations with explicit plans for testing, compatibility, staged rollout, rollback, blast-radius reduction, and operational readiness.
• Define measurable outcomes for cluster health, upgrade currency, infrastructure reliability, provisioning quality, operational toil, security posture, capacity, and cloud spend; use them to prioritize improvements.
• Partner closely with Platform Engineering, SRE, Security, and application engineering teams to establish clear ownership boundaries and provide infrastructure that enables teams to operate effectively.
• Develop senior and staff engineers, providing technical coaching, career development, and opportunities for increased ownership and influence.
• Build a culture of systematic debugging, strong design reviews, incident learning, operational ownership, pragmatic decision-making, and continuous improvement.

Cloud Infrastructure owns the foundational environment the company runs on, including:

• GCP organization and project structure
• Cloud networking, VPCs, load balancers, routing, and DNS
• Production Kubernetes/GKE cluster architecture, operation, troubleshooting, and lifecycle
• Terraform frameworks, modules, state, automation, and infrastructure provisioning
• Base infrastructure observability and telemetry
• IAM and service accounts
• Secrets infrastructure
• Infrastructure security primitives
• Cloud capacity and cost optimization
• Infrastructure upgrades and lifecycle management

The team does not own the applications running in that environment. Application reliability, application deployment workflows, developer tooling, and CI/CD are owned by adjacent engineering teams.

• 8+ years of professional engineering experience in cloud infrastructure, systems engineering, infrastructure platform engineering, SRE, or related disciplines, including substantial direct production infrastructure ownership.
• 3+ years of people management experience, including hiring, coaching, performance management, and leading senior-level infrastructure engineers.
• Demonstrated hands-on experience designing, provisioning, operating, and troubleshooting production public-cloud infrastructure; substantial GCP experience strongly preferred.
• Deep working knowledge of cloud networking, including VPCs, subnets, routing, firewalls, NAT, DNS, load balancing, service connectivity, TCP/IP, HTTP(S), and TLS.
• Direct production experience administering and troubleshooting Kubernetes clusters, preferably GKE, with understanding of control planes, worker nodes, scheduling, services, ingress, networking, DNS, storage, resource pressure, node pools, and upgrades. Experience limited to deploying applications into Kubernetes is insufficient.
• Significant hands-on Terraform experience, including reusable modules, remote state, automation, Git-based workflows, and safe review and deployment of infrastructure changes.
• Experience designing and operating highly available, scalable production infrastructure.
• Strong understanding of cloud security fundamentals including IAM, service accounts, secrets management, and infrastructure security controls.
• Experience leading complex infrastructure migrations, upgrades, or architectural changes with significant potential blast radius.
• Excellent systems and production troubleshooting judgment across Kubernetes, Linux, networking, DNS, and cloud services; ability to lead teams through difficult root-cause investigations.
• Demonstrated ability to make pragmatic technical tradeoffs across reliability, scalability, security, engineering velocity, and cost.
• Demonstrated success recruiting, developing, evaluating, and retaining strong infrastructure engineers while delegating meaningful technical ownership.
• Ability to provide technical leadership to senior and staff-level engineers without needing to personally own every implementation detail.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills and the ability to work effectively across engineering, security, product, and executive stakeholders.
• Periodic in-person collaboration in a UJET office or designated location.

• Experience leading teams responsible for large-scale, multi-cluster or multi-region GKE/Kubernetes environments.
• Experience designing reusable Terraform frameworks and infrastructure standards used across multiple engineering teams.
• Experience with Prometheus, Grafana, centralized logging, infrastructure alerting, tracing, and observability standards.
• Experience driving meaningful cloud cost optimization initiatives.
• Experience operating infrastructure for SaaS platforms with high availability and scalability requirements.
• Experience working in environments with strong security and compliance requirements.
• Experience helping define clear organizational boundaries between Cloud Infrastructure, Platform Engineering, SRE, Security, and application engineering.

You will build a Cloud Infrastructure organization that senior engineers respect and application teams trust.

Production GKE clusters and GCP networking are resilient, observable, and consistently maintained. Terraform changes are repeatable and reviewed. Major upgrades are planned and executed with controlled risk. Incidents lead to durable fixes. Cloud capacity and spending are understood and managed. Senior and staff engineers operate with autonomy, clear accountability, and strong technical guidance.

Most importantly, Cloud Infrastructure provides a stable, secure, and well-automated foundation so product teams can move quickly without needing to become experts in the underlying cloud environment.

Annual US Hiring Range: $170,000 - $190,000