Platform Billing - Senior Manager, Software Engineering

Elastic, the Search AI Company, enables everyone to find the answers they need in real time, using all their data, at scale — unleashing the potential of businesses and people. The Elastic Search AI Platform, used by more than 50% of the Fortune 500, brings together the precision of search and the intelligence of AI to enable everyone to accelerate the results that matter. By taking advantage of all structured and unstructured data — securing and protecting private information more effectively — Elastic’s complete, cloud-based solutions for search, security, and observability help organizations deliver on the promise of AI.

PLEASE NOTE: due to the need to align with the distributed locations of the team, this role will be hired only in the Eastern or Central timezones (EST / CST).

What is The Role

Elastic’s Platform Billing organization builds the foundational systems that power our SaaS business. Our mission is to deliver a simple, transparent, and scalable billing experience that supports Elastic’s growth across self-service, enterprise, and marketplace channels.

Within Platform Engineering, the Billing & Metering team operates critical data pipelines and billing engines that process usage and cost signals across AWS, GCP, and Azure and convert them into accurate, auditable invoices and revenue records. This work enables the monetization of hundreds of millions in recurring revenue and is critical for financial reporting, compliance, and customer trust.

We are seeking a Senior Manager, Software Engineering (L7) to lead a globally distributed engineering group. You will lead senior engineers, drive execution across highly complex initiatives, and partner closely with Product, Finance, IT, Cloud, and other Platform teams. This role demands a leader who excels in operational excellence, reliability engineering, incident management, and continuous improvement, in addition to technical and team leadership.

What You Will Be Doing

People & Technical Leadership

• Lead, mentor, and grow engineers in a distributed environment.
• Guide career development, performance management, and the growth of senior/staff engineers and tech leads.
• Foster a culture of ownership, high standards, and operational accountability.

Execution, Delivery & Operational Excellence

• Drive roadmap execution and ensure reliable delivery on different initiatives involving usage ingestion, cost accuracy, billing logic, and revenue systems.
• Maintain a high operational bar, including: Robust on-call processes, Clear runbooks and escalation paths, Strong observability and monitoring practices, Frequent incident reviews and systemic improvements
• Balance feature delivery with technical debt, reliability work, and KTLO responsibilities.
• Establish clear KPIs around system reliability, data accuracy, and operational health.

Strategic & Architectural Leadership

• Shape long-term architecture for own domain
• Anticipate scaling challenges and influence investments in reliability, data quality, and automation.
• Provide technical critique and guidance during design reviews and architectural discussions.

Cross-Org Collaboration & Influence

• Partner with different stakeholders to deliver cohesive end-to-end billing and metering capabilities.
• Work closely with Finance and Compliance stakeholders to ensure the integrity of revenue-impacting systems.
• Communicate priorities, trade-offs, timelines, and outcomes clearly across multiple layers of leadership.
• Represent own area in planning cycles, operational reviews, and audits.

What You Bring

• Proven experience leading engineering teams with a strong operational focus (on-call ownership, incident management, SLIs/SLOs, reliability targets).
• Solid technical foundation in distributed systems, large-scale data processing, or SaaS platform engineering.
• Demonstrated ability to scale systems, processes, and operational practices in fast-moving environments.
• Strong technical judgment and the ability to guide architectural decisions.
• Exceptional communication and influencing skills across engineering and business stakeholders.

Bonus Points

• Experience with SOX compliance, revenue-related audit processes, or similar regulatory/compliance frameworks.
• Background in cloud metering, usage-based billing, or subscription billing platforms.
• Familiarity wit