Manager, Engineering

For over 20 years, Smartsheet has helped people and teams achieve–well, anything. From seamless work management to smart, scalable solutions, we’ve always worked with flow. We’re building tools that empower teams to automate the manual, uncover insights, and scale smarter. But more than that, we’re creating space– space to think big, take action, and unlock the kind of work that truly matters. Because when challenge meets purpose, and passion turns into progress, that’s magic at work, and it’s what we show up for everyday.

The Grid Service and Platform Engineering team is looking for a highly motivated and collaborative Software Engineering Manager. This role involves leading the engineering of mission-critical, tier 0 service infrastructure, the foundational data platform that powers Smartsheet at scale. You will oversee services that handle millions requests per day, operate at 99.999% availability, and deliver low-latency, high-throughput performance for millions of customers worldwide.

We are an agile team that operates iteratively, focused on building high-quality software and adhering to rigorous operational best practices across complex, cross-functional distributed systems.

This full-time position reports to the Director, Engineering and can be located in our Bellevue, WA office, or you may work remotely from anywhere in the US where Smartsheet is a registered employer.

You Will:

• Manage one or more related teams of 6–10+ software engineers, driving development of tier 0 grid services and platform infrastructure that millions of customers depend on daily.
• Own and uphold 99.999% service availability targets across critical platform services, embedding reliability engineering, incident management, and on-call rigor into team culture.
• Help architect and guide technical vision to evolve low-latency, high-throughput service platforms capable of sustaining millions requests per day with predictable, consistent performance under load.
• Guide and mentor engineers on distributed systems architecture, scalability patterns, and platform best practices while leading design reviews for high-stakes system components.
• Lead cross-functional technical efforts spanning multiple upstream dependents, partner teams, and internal consumers, building alignment and resolving systemic dependencies across the organization.
• Plan and deliver complex, end-to-end infrastructure projects with high technical ambiguity, managing risks, communicating clearly to stakeholders, and building cross-team consensus.
• Drive SLO/SLA definition, capacity planning, performance benchmarking, and observability strategy across your platform services.
• Partner closely with product management, infrastructure, security, and other engineering pillars to shape technical roadmaps and contribute to long-range platform strategy.
• Hire exceptional engineering talent and grow your teams by attracting, developing, and advancing great engineers strategically across multiple teams.
• Mentor and coach both individual contributors and managers within and beyond your teams, identifying and developing potential successors.
• Own quarterly and annual technical and operational goals for your platform area, managing metrics, reporting, and continuous improvement initiatives.
• Communicate effectively with executives and non-technical stakeholders, anticipating cross-team conflicts and proactively driving resolution.
• Champion AI adoption in both software and platform engineering lifecycles, leveraging shared learnings to improve operational efficiency and customer experiences.

You Have:

• 8+ years of software development, strong CS fundamentals (algorithms, data structures, distributed systems, systems design).
• 3+ years of engineering management, leading high-availability infrastructure/platform services.
• Proven track record owning and operating tier 0/mission-critical systems with five-nines (99.999%) availability.
• Hands-on experience building/operating low-latency, high-throughput service platforms (millions requests/day).
• Deep understanding of scalability, fault tolerance, and operational patterns for five-nines availability.
• Experience managing complex dependencies across distributed architectures.
• Strong CS fundamentals: distributed systems, concurrency, caching, data consistency, performance optimization.
• Experience building and scaling large-scale, cloud-native backend services (AWS or equivalent).
• Proficiency with observability: metrics, distributed tracing, alerting, and SLO/SLA management at scale.
• Experience productionizing services for multiple internal/external platform consumers.
• Demonstrated success building and scaling engineering teams (recruiting, onboarding, retain