Senior Engineering Manager, Cloud Engineering
Altana · Brooklyn, San Francisco · $240,000–$280,000 (stated in the posting)
Altana is the network for trusted trade. Our AI-powered product network empowers governments and businesses to build a more resilient and secure global economy while keeping trade flowing.
The Opportunity at Altana
The Cloud Engineering team is hiring a Senior Engineering Manager to lead the group that owns Altana's regulated and sovereign environments. These are the accredited, compliance-constrained deployments our government customers run on, including our FedRAMP environments and dedicated sovereign clusters. You will report to the Senior Director of Platform Engineering and lead a team of three to four engineers across the US, UK, and Australia.
The usual playbook does not apply here. Connectivity and automation are constrained and accreditation obligations shape engineering decisions well before anyone opens a design doc. Your job is to make this domain work like a platform instead of a set of individual builds, so that each new accredited environment launches faster than the one before it, and so product teams can keep shipping without having to absorb the regulatory complexity themselves.
Your Responsibilities
- Own the architecture and operation of our regulated and sovereign environments across AWS and Azure, along with the IaC (Infrastructure-as-Code), Kubernetes, and release tooling beneath them
- Lead the standardization of environment builds into a repeatable blueprint, so the number of environments can grow without headcount growing with it
- Make sure critical technical decisions in the domain are sound, through design review, RFCs, prototypes, and whiteboard sessions, and hold the quality bar on what the team ships
- Stay close to the work with hands-on engineering of your own, usually operational tooling or greenfield projects
- Work with our Security and Compliance team to embed secure-by-default patterns across your environments and make control evidence a routine output of how the team works
- Keep accreditations healthy, with vulnerability remediation inside contractual SLA windows, current access reviews, and data-handling obligations met
- Support critical infrastructure by maintaining high SLAs, using progressive deployment strategies such as blue/green deploys, and redundancy with multi-region/HA environments
- Represent the team in audits, assessments, and customer-facing technical conversations about security posture and data residency
- Own a planning process that produces realistic commitments, and give implementation, commercial, and customer teams go-live dates they can plan against
- Build solid operational practice across your environments, covering runbooks, documentation, capacity planning, on-call coverage, and incident response, and take your own turn in the escalation rotation
- Own the cost of the environments you run. Understand what drives it, report on it, and prioritize the controls that keep a growing fleet efficient
- Translate accreditation and regulatory constraints into terms product and commercial teams can plan around
- Build strong working relationships across Implementations, Security and Compliance, Developer Experience, and product engineering, and use them to negotiate dependencies and priorities
- Lead, coach, and grow the engineers on your team, with full ownership of performance management, reviews, compensation input, and career development
- Manage a distributed team spanning multiple globally distributed time zones
- Assess team structure and coverage against what the domain needs, act as hiring manager for your open roles, and work with recruiting to build a pipeline and close candidates
About You
- Background in SRE or platform engineering leadership
- Experience managing engineers directly, with full ownership of performance, growth, and hiring, and ready to lead through other leads as the group grows
- 8+ years building and operating cloud infrastructure in production, including time owning an environment end to end
- Direct experience delivering into US federal or other highly regulated government environments, such as FedRAMP or an equivalent compliance-heavy program, and a working understanding of how accreditation shapes engineering decisions
- Production experience building and operating environments in AWS and/or Azure
- Strong Infrastructure as Code skills with Terraform, OpenTofu, or similar, and hands-on Kubernetes experience including cluster management and operational maintenance
- Strong software engineering fundamentals. You lead from the front on technical judgment, not just from the org chart
- Experience designing tooling and patterns that work in air-gapped and compliance-heavy infrastructure
- A track record of establishing operational practice on a team, including runbooks, on-call, documentation, and planning discipline, without slowing delivery down to do it
- Experience leading engineers across distant time zones, and the deliberate written communication that requires
- Strong sense of shared ownership, a collaborative disposition, and excellent written and verbal communication skills. This role sits between engineering, security, compliance, implementation, and customers, and it will not work for someone who wants to stay inside their own team's boundary
- BS or MS degree in Computer Science, or equivalent experience
Nice to have, but not required
- Eligibility for a US security clearance
- Experience with other non-US national accreditation regimes
- Experience taking a compliance program from zero, including sponsorship, initial authorization, and delta assessment
- Experience at a startup or high-growth technology company
This role can be fully remote within the United States or based in our Brooklyn, NY or Washington, DC hub locations, with hybrid work flexibility.
US Salary Range and Benefits
$240,000 - $280,000
The salary range, to the extent specified for this role, is a good faith statement of the minimum and maximum levels of the annual based salary for the position. The base salary offered to a successful candidate will depend on a wide range of compensation factors, including, but not limited to, work experience, education and/or training, critical skills, and/or business considerations. Competitive equity grants are included in the majority of full time offers; and are considered part of Altana's total compensation package. Altana also offers either a discretionary bonus or a variable compensation plan depending on the role. Additionally, Altana offers top-tier benefits for full-time employees, including:
- Flexible Time Off: Altana operates with a Flexible Time Off (FTO) policy that gives you agency over your own time off so you can maximize your work-life balance.
- Parental Leave: We offer industry leading Paid Parental Leave (PPL), providing 14 weeks of leave for non-birthing, adoptive, and foster parents and up to 26 weeks of leave for birthing parents, all paid at 100% of your base salary.
- Health Benefits: We have a full suite of medical, vision, and dental benefits with generous employer contributions, designed to give you flexibility and choice for your individual health situation. Our high deductible health plan is 100% employer paid for employees and supplemented with an employer contribution to your Health Savings Account (HSA). There is also a Flexible Spending Account (FSA) option.
- Supplemental Benefits: Altana provides life, short- and long-term disability, and AD&D insurance coverage, all at no cost to you, so you know that you and your loved ones are covered in case of an emergency.
- 401(k) Savings: Save for and invest in your future using our Guideline 401(k) retirement savings program.
- Commuter Benefits: Save money on your commute by setting aside pre-tax funds for public transit or parking!
- Wellness: Because we value mental and emotional health, every Altana employee has access to a free premium subscription to Calm, the #1 app for meditation, sleep, and mindfulness.
- Pet Insurance: Pets are family too! Keep them healthy with Wishbone insurance and / or our Total Pet vet service and telehealth discount plan.
- Employee Assistance Program: Free access to confidential personal support.
- Dependent Care FSA: You will have access to a Dependent Care FSA, which allows you to set aside pre-tax funds for childcare expenses
The recruiter assigned to this role can share more information about the specific compensation and benefit details associated with this role during the hiring process.
Our Values
Our values are the core beliefs that shape who we are, what we stand for, and how we behave.They form the foundation of Altana’s culture and integrity and guide how we hire, design, build, and connect with each other and our customers.
- Trust: Our customers and partners entrust us with missions of the highest importance. We honor that by keeping our word, meeting commitments, and ensuring every action we take reinforces confidence in us. We rely on each other to deliver, to speak openly, and to hold ourselves accountable.
- Resilience: In a world of uncertainty and complexity, our work must withstand challenges, evolve with conditions, and ensure reliability over time. Resilience is both how we operate and what we deliver. It’s how we respond when things don’t go to plan –– we adapt, we support each other, and we keep moving forward.
- Stewardship: We are stewards of every mission we touch. Because our work impacts lives and futures, we hold ourselves accountable to delivering mission impact and never compromising. Our responsibility extends beyond individual projects to the broader system of global trade. We believe that stewardship starts from within so that we can bring focus, creativity, and excellence to our work. Each of us is personally responsible for fostering a workplace where people can thrive. And we are stewards of the greater good of the company. By holding ourselves and each other accountable, we build a culture of innovation and collective success that reflects the scale of our mission.
- Courage: Courage is what unlocks the seemingly impossible for our customers. It’s the core value that drives us make bold moves and take on big, complicated network problems—the ones others avoid. We know success isn't guaranteed, but we have the audacious vision to believe a solution is possible and to build it. Courage fuels our growth mindset. It means embracing challenges that make us stronger, and it’s demonstrated by how we approach hard conversations and complex projects.
At Altana, we believe that a diverse workforce enables greater creativity, performance, and adaptability. We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer and welcome you to join us as you are. Our employment opportunities and decisions are based on business needs and individual qualifications, without regard to race, color, religious creed, national origin, ancestry, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, genetic information, family care or medical leave status, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by the laws or regulations in the areas in which we operate. We prohibit discrimination and harassment of any type, in any situation.
Offers related to employment at Altana will come from an Altana.ai email address. We will never ask for payment as part of the interview or onboarding process.