Engineering Manager, Cloud Platform

THE ROLE

As the Engineering Manager for Baseten's Cloud Platform team, you will directly manage a team of cloud platform engineers responsible for building the systems and processes that keep our infrastructure scalable, reliable, and efficient — from automated deployments and monitoring to performance optimization and incident response.

You are a people-first leader with a strong cloud infrastructure background. You set a high bar for reliability and operational excellence, engage credibly in technical discussions and code reviews, and know how to build a culture of ownership and accountability. You'll spend most of your time close to the work: unblocking your team, shaping technical direction on day-to-day decisions, and developing your engineers. At Baseten, we work closely with our users to understand their struggles operationalizing ML — you'll keep your team connected to that mission and translate user learnings into better infrastructure.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Recruit, hire, and grow a high-performing team of cloud platform engineers; provide ongoing coaching, feedback, and career development through regular 1:1s.
• Set clear performance expectations, hold a high bar, and create an environment where engineers do their best work.
• Foster a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement.
• Drive day-to-day technical decisions through design reviews, code reviews, and architectural discussions; translate the infrastructure roadmap into clear team priorities and milestones, and hold execution against them.
• Establish standards and best practices for reliability, performance, and operational excellence; ensure the team owns projects end-to-end, from specification through production.
• Exercise and encourage good judgment on tooling and architectural tradeoffs, with a bias against unnecessary complexity.
• Partner with product and engineering teams to align infrastructure work with business priorities; represent your team's progress, capacity, and technical tradeoffs clearly to leadership.
• Serve as the escalation point for major incidents; drive resolution with urgency, ensure the team learns systematically, and stay connected to users so those learnings feed back into infrastructure improvements.

REQUIREMENTS

• Proven experience directly managing engineers in a cloud infrastructure, platform engineering, or SRE context (not managing managers).
• Extensive hands-on experience with Kubernetes, with the ability to engage credibly in architectural discussions and code reviews.
• Strong background building and maintaining scalable, production infrastructure.
• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code tools (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi) and CI/CD tooling (e.g., GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI, Jenkins).
• Demonstrated ability to drive projects end-to-end — from specification to execution — and coach your team to do the same.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills; able to influence across teams without direct authority.
• Track record of recruiting and growing engineering talent.
• Openness to learning about ML infrastructure; prior machine learning experience is not required.

NICE TO HAVE

• Experience with OSS observability tooling (Prometheus, ELK stack, Grafana, OpenTelemetry).
• Background in multi-cloud environments or GPU infrastructure.
• Experience building and managing on-call rotations and incident response processes.