Control Plane - Engineering Manager (Serverless Core Architecture)

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.

About the Team

The Platform Control Plane team’s mission is to provide a simple and flexible experience to thousands of users. Our team sits at the heart of Elastic’s business strategy, enabling the company to grow by evolving and developing distributed scalable backend capabilities and integrations. We have designed and built a platform that monetizes millions of dollars of recurring revenue per year. By joining our team, you will have a direct impact on the continued rapid growth of a SaaS product while working in a cross-team setting.

About the Role

We are looking to add a Software Manager to lead our Elastic Cloud Serverless control plane core services and public APIs. You will mentor and lead a globally distributed team of 5 committed engineers in our organization. We are solving some very hard problems using an innovative technology stack. This is a unique opportunity to help lead our cloud engineering efforts and make an immediate impact on our strategy and implementation. This role also requires coordination with Engineering and Product Management teams and is an excellent opportunity to work in a collaborative cross-team setting. With the team and your peers, you will iterate and grow our organization's processes and software.

What You Will Be Doing

People Management

• You will set the right team structure and composition, amplifying cohesion and collaboration among team members, and establishing a culture of operational excellence aligned with our Elastic’s source code.
• You will provide continuous feedback to your engineers, restating your expectations and communicating clear outcomes. You will help them grow to the next level and coach them while on the job.
• You will audit your team execution and processes, and find ways to increase their efficiency and efficacy.
• You will proactively communicate performance gaps and act quickly to set your team members up for success.

Project Management

• You will define a clear long-term vision, aligned with business priorities and in collaboration with key partners in Product and Engineering to help your team make good decisions.
• On the path to your long-term vision, you will establish measurable short-term goals and outcomes, and assign clear ownership to specific engineers to drive them forward.
• You will track and steer the execution of work and report on results, status, risks, and risk mitigation plans.
• You will be a beacon of light for your engineers when ambiguity and/or time pressure are high, letting them know what your rationale is, so they too learn how to prioritize their own work and make their own right decisions at their level.

Partner Management

• You will build trust and, as a result, influence your peers and partners to define the right goals, outcomes, and vision for your team.
• You will form strong partnerships with key players across Elastic to drive roadmap alignment and deliver the right outcomes for our customers.
• You will lead by example, demonstrating the behaviors and values that produce the most impactful outcomes out of your team. Your partners will recognize your team as reliable, predictable, and highly performant.

What You Bring Along

• 3+ years of experience leading teams of software engineers.
• Your teams have delivered software for a SaaS service.
• Your teams have operated SaaS services requiring oncall schedules.
• Extensive knowledge of distributed system architectures.
• Experience building a multi-region cloud infrastructure and cloud orchestration.
• Experience building applications on top of Kubernetes and a good understanding of Kubernetes fundamentals.
• Experience with 3rd party Cloud hosting services (AWS, GCP, Azure)
• Experience, deep passion and love for automated testing and CICD pipelines.
• Experience with secure coding practices (static code analysis, security code reviews)
• 5+ years previously as a software engineer, enabling you to understand the core principle