Software Engineering Manager, Software Platform

About the role Muon seeks an Software Engineering Manager to lead our Software Platform team. This team builds and operates the paved roads (CI/CD, Kubernetes, Terraform, Bazel, AWS, IAM, data infrastructure, and more) that underpin both our internal tooling and the production systems behind customer-facing products such as Muon Mission Command. The Software Platform team is critical to the overall growth and success of Muon's software engineering organization: as the number of product teams, services, and customers expands, the leverage this team creates, through reduced cognitive load, eliminated toil, and self-service Golden Paths, directly determines how fast the rest of engineering can move. This manager will inherit a team of six engineers, and will be responsible for both scaling that team to meet current demand and evolving it into a product-minded platform organization whose customers are Muon's own developers. This position is hybrid and requires working on-site in our San Jose, CA office three days per week. Responsibilities Lead, mentor, and grow the Software Platform team. Own hiring, performance management, coaching, and team composition for a growing platform organization. Actively recruit engineers to meet the demands of a rapidly scaling software department. Define team goals, and technical roadmaps that align with companies priorities. Ensure reliability, scalability, and performance of mission-critical services operating in production. Work with cross-functional stakeholders to translate mission needs into clear requirements and technical specifications. Drive engineering best practices including design reviews, code quality, testing, and observability. Manage team capacity, staffing, and growth, including hiring, coaching, and performance development. Promote a culture of technical ownership, continuous improvement, and pragmatic delivery. Build feedback loops with developer-customers, prioritize based on real friction, and hold clear ownership boundaries so product teams retain accountability for their applications. Qualifications BS/MS in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field OR equivalent industry experience. 5+ years of software engineering experience and 3+ years managing software engineering teams building and operating production systems. Direct experience managing a platform, infrastructure, DevOps, or SRE team, including responsibility for hiring, performance management, coaching senior engineers, and shaping team composition. Strong technical background in distributed systems, backend services, or platform development, with hands-on depth in Kubernetes, Terraform, and AWS. Demonstrated experience supporting production systems with real uptime, reliability, and performance requirements (SLOs, on-call, incident response, postmortems). Track record of establishing paved roads / Golden Paths and treating internal platforms as products, with developers as customers. Experience running a DevOps or SRE function embedded within a platform team (rather than as a separate silo), consistent with our team model. Experience defining technical direction and driving execution through a team, including prioritization, roadmap ownership, and stakeholder alignment. Strong communication skills and comfort partnering with cross-functional stakeholders across engineering, security, and IT/information systems. Ability to hold clear ownership boundaries, comfortable saying "no" to work that belongs to product teams while still being a great partner to them. Nice-to-have Skills Hands-on experience with Bazel or another large-scale monorepo build system. Experience leading data engineering or data platform work as part of a broader platform team. Familiarity with Cloudflare, Artifactory, IAM/Okta, InfluxDB, or Grafana-based observability stacks. Experience scaling a platform team through a period of rapid organizational growth. Experience partnering closely with information security teams on platform-level cont…