Sr. Manager, Engineering Operations

Description

• Job Title: Sr. Manager, Engineering Operations
• Job Type: Full-time
• Location: Hybrid - London, UK (3 days on-site per week)

About CloudBees

CloudBees helps organizations build, run, and govern software factories, giving enterprises the confidence to ship software better, faster, and safer.

Writing code is no longer the bottleneck. Governing what reaches production and validating its impact is. As enterprises adopt agentic coding, software is created faster than most teams can review, secure, and validate. Without consistent governance, organizations risk shipping code they cannot explain, audit, or trust.

CloudBees addresses this challenge without asking teams to replace the tools they already use. Across every toolchain a customer runs, CloudBees makes each change, human or AI, visible, auditable, and accountable before it reaches production. CloudBees Unify is the product behind this: a governance layer, with context and control-plane capabilities, that enforces consistent policy and evidence across every tool, team, and workflow.

Founded in 2010, CloudBees is backed by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bridgepoint Capital, HSBC, Golub Capital, Delta-v Capital, Matrix Partners, and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Visit us at www.cloudbees.com.

About The Role

CloudBees is hiring a Sr. Manager, Engineering Operations to lead a distributed hands-on engineering team. The team governs and runs the cloud accounts, security controls, and shared engineering systems that CloudBees product teams build on, and keeps them secure, compliant, and affordable. You will also lead the team in using AI to remove manual work from cloud governance and operations and shorten delivery time for the engineering teams it supports, and you will be expected to use these tools in your own work.

This role reports to the Director of Engineering Systems and contributes directly to delivering our next-generation DevOps solution to customers.

Requirements

What You'll Do

You manage a team of about 5 engineers who work across both infrastructure and software, owning the governance and operation of the cloud accounts, security controls, and shared engineering systems that other teams rely on, and building the automation and shared services that go with them. The team is distributed across time zones, which gives us follow-the-sun coverage and depends on clear written communication and handoffs.

This is a hands-on management role. Alongside managing the team, you help shape projects and take on work that is not on the critical path, such as prototypes, investigations, and improvements, so the team's critical work never waits on you. You deliver through the team and its senior engineers, not by being part of every decision.

Engineering Operations focuses on cloud governance and shared operational platforms. A separate tooling team builds tools for engineers, and you will work closely with it and with other parts of the Engineering Systems department.

What The Team Is Responsible For

Cloud governance, security, and compliance: AWS accounts, roles, policies, identity and access, and networking, along with security baselines and compliance evidence, in partnership with product security.

Shared engineering systems: administering and governing the systems engineers use every day (for example GitHub, Nexus, Datadog, PagerDuty, and shared CI infrastructure), including access, secrets, supply-chain controls, and standards such as on-call and incident process.

Cost and vendors: FinOps for AWS, GCP, and Datadog, plus contracts and renewals for engineering tools.

Hosting and SRE support: hosting the smaller shared services that teams write, and helping product SRE teams execute.

People: Grow Engineers & Build the Team

Hold regular 1:1s and coaching conversations, give direct and timely feedback including on performance, and give people a clear path forward.

Develop senior engineers so they own technical decisions and dependencies without you.

Identify high-potential engineers early and sponsor them into opportunities beyond the team.

Hire well, onboard quickly, and build a team that raises problems early and holds itself accountable.

Work with talent acquisition, HR, and senior engineering staff on recruiting, performance evaluations, promotions, and compensation.

Act as the escalation point for issues, concerns, and conflicts, and work with HR Business Partners to resolve personnel matters.

Strategy & Influence

• Own the quarterly and multi-quarter strategy for your area and tie the team's work to business outcomes that every engineer can explain.
• Take part in leadership meetings and bring risks and opportunities beyond your own scope to leadership with a proposed solution.
• Build working relationships with product, engineering, and business stakeholders, and with other parts of the Engineering Systems department, including ProdSec and SecOps.
• Work with non-engineering teams such as GRC (Governance, Risk, and Compliance) and Finance, and turn their requirements into controls, audit evidence, and cost reporting the team can deliver.
• Work with product managers on planning, with a focus on user value, and coach team members to do the same.

Execution & Resources

• Deliver reliably without being in the critical path. Put in place systems that show progress, surface risks early, and let the team correct itself.
• Coordinate delivery with the teams you depend on and the teams that depend on you, and maintain a roadmap that improves delivery efficiency for the engineering teams you support.
• Make priority trade-offs and explain the reasons. Protect capacity for tech debt and operational health.
• Own FinOps for AWS, GCP, and Datadog, and manage engineering tool contracts and renewals. Track spend, find savings, and weigh cost against reliability and speed together with the engineers and teams that use those systems.
• Plan software, staffing, and tooling needs, and propose changes to team structure when the current structure no longer fits the work.

Technical Credibility & Engineering Execellence

• Engage in the technical decisions that matter (cloud architecture, security, reliability, and cost), set guardrails rather than instructions, and mentor the team on technical decision making.
• Take part in deep-dive troubleshooting and lead post-mortems that find root causes of complex issues.
• Raise the engineering quality bar. Drive measurable improvements in quality, reliability, or developer velocity, and treat incident response, observability, and on-call health as first-class concerns.
• Stay hands-on: help shape project designs and take on non-critical-path work yourself. Stay current on tools and practices, and share improvements beyond your own team.
• Use AI to Improve How Engineering Works
• We want to use AI to reduce toil and speed up delivery, both for this team and for the engineering teams it supports.
• Identify steps in our governance, hosting, support, and operations workflows where AI tools or agents can save time or improve quality, such as access requests, policy review, compliance evidence collection, cost analysis, and incident triage.
• Define how we measure the result (for example cycle time, review time, failure rate, or engineer time saved) and keep what the evidence supports.
• Set clear expectations for safe use: evaluation before rollout, guardrails, handling of sensitive data and untrusted input, and cost.
• Share what works and what does not with the tooling team and other partner teams, and let evidence rather than mandates drive adoption.
• Use AI tools in your own work and encourage the team to do the same.

What The Role Requires

Required

• 2+ years managing software engineering teams, with a record of developing senior engineers, ideally on a team distributed across time zones.
• 3+ years of hands-on experience on SaaS products.
• 4+ years of hands-on software engineering, including infrastructure work, with strong problem-solving skills.
• 4+ years building and operating complex systems in production, including cloud infrastructure and governance (for example AWS, identity and access management, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, observability, and incident response).
• A record of delivering through influence rather than authority, including working with product management and partner engineering teams.
• Experience owning a multi-quarter strategy or roadmap for a team or area and tying it to business outcomes.
• Solid understanding of software development, project management, quality assurance, and customer advocacy.
• Experience advocating modern development practices and approaches, and building an environment of feedback, continuous improvement, and knowledge sharing.
• BA/BS in Computer Science or a related field.
• Strong written and verbal English communication and demonstrated technical leadership.
• Meets or exceeds the CloudBees leadership principles and the functional and technical depth required for this role.

Strongly Preferred

• Demonstrated use of AI to improve engineering process, such as incident analysis, change and deployment review, release automation, or agent-based operational workflows.
• Experience introducing AI tooling to a team or department and measuring whether it worked.
• Working knowledge of the risks of AI in engineering workflows, including evaluation, guardrails, data handling, prompt injection, and cost.
• Experience managing cloud and SaaS cost (FinOps), for example AWS, GCP, or Datadog.

What We Value

Customer Obsessed — You treat customer problems as your own and build relationships with the people behind the logo, not just the account. You can point to decisions you changed because of what a customer told you.

High Agency — You own problems beyond your job description and move without waiting to be asked. When the path isn't defined, you make the call and bring people with you rather than working around them.

Truth Seeking — You hold a strong point of view and update it when the data says otherwise. You argue for the best answer regardless of who's in the room, and once a decision is made, you commit to it fully.

Hard Work — You own the end result, not just your slice of it, and you go beyond what's expected to get there. You work smart as well as hard, and you find real reward in building something demanding alongside people who do the same.

Ship Excellence — You hold a painfully high quality bar and keep raising it, while shipping with urgency instead of waiting for perfect. Every iteration is something you learn from.

Direct Feedback — You give honest, constructive feedback regardless of seniority or tenure, and you actively ask for it in return. You deliver it with enough care that people want to hear it from you.

What CloudBees Offers

• Be part of opening a brand-new office. Real ownership from day one, and the chance to shape how the space works.
• Broad exposure across facilities, events, HR, and marketing. A genuine launchpad for your career.
• A global, collaborative team that lives by our values: Customer Obsessed, High Agency, Truth Seeking, Hard Work, Ship Excellence, Direct Feedback.
• Support for your headspace — literally. A company-sponsored Headspace account and a fully funded global Employee Assistance Programme, so support is there when you need it.
• A home office that works. A monthly stipend toward your home setup, alongside the chance to work with your peers in the office.
• Upside when we win. Share in our success with a performance-based bonus plan aligned with both your personal achievements and company milestones.
• People who sweat the craft. A team that takes its work seriously and invests in each other's growth.

Equal Opportunity Statement

CloudBees is committed to providing equal opportunities in employment. We value diversity and inclusion and make decisions based on skills, qualifications, and experience. We do not discriminate on the basis of age, disability, gender identity, marital or civil status, pregnancy, maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, or sexual orientation, in accordance with applicable laws.

Data Protection Statement

CloudBees is committed to providing equal opportunities in employment. We value diversity and inclusion and make decisions based on skills, qualifications, and experience. We do not discriminate on the basis of age, disability, gender identity, marital or civil status, pregnancy, maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, or sexual orientation, in accordance with applicable laws.

Disclaimer

This job description provides an overview of the role and key responsibilities. It is not an exhaustive list, and responsibilities may evolve in line with business needs.