Engineering Manager - Cloud Systems

About the role

Every merchant on Shopify depends on infrastructure they never have to think about. Cloud Systems is the foundational layer underneath all of Shopify's infrastructure: we build and run the systems that provide compute, service discovery, internal routing, and egress routing for the entire platform. When it works, nobody notices. That's the point, and it's a hard thing to pull off at Shopify's scale.

As the Engineering Manager for Cloud Systems, you'll lead a highly senior, globally distributed team of Software engineers. You'll set direction, raise the bar on reliability and execution, and stay close enough to the technical work to go deep with the engineers doing it. You'll also partner closely with our ML Infrastructure team to build out GPU capabilities and make Day 2 operations for ML workloads solid. Coming up next: extending our platform across multiple clouds, and building and running our own Kubernetes and host OS for VMs. If you want to own the foundation and shape where it goes, this is the role.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead, grow, and support a senior team of Software engineers, building an environment where experienced engineers do their best work

• Set technical direction for Shopify's compute, service discovery, internal routing, and egress routing systems, in partnership with the team's technical leads

• Stay hands-on with the technical work: read and review code, weigh in on design, and pressure-test architectural decisions

• Drive execution on large, cross-cutting infrastructure projects, spotting risk early and getting off-track work back on course

• Own operational excellence for the team's systems, including on-call health, incident response, and turning incidents into lasting reliability improvements

• Partner with ML Infrastructure to build GPU capabilities and improve Day 2 operations for ML workloads

• Help shape the team's path toward multi-cloud and toward building and running our own Kubernetes and host OS for VMs

• Lead effectively across very different time zones, building rituals and communication habits that keep a distributed team connected and moving fast

• Collaborate with peer infrastructure teams and the product engineering teams that build on top of the platform

• Hire, coach, and develop engineers, and give clear, candid feedback that helps people grow

Qualifications:

• A track record of leading Software engineering teams, ideally including senior and Staff-level engineers

• A background in SRE, production engineering, or infrastructure platform work, with the technical credibility to lead deeply experienced engineers

• Hands-on experience running Kubernetes at fleet scale (GKE, EKS, or similar)

• Strong understanding of cloud networking, including load balancers, gateways, service discovery, and service mesh

• Solid distributed systems, operating systems, and networking fundamentals

• Experience operating production systems with on-call responsibilities and leading teams through incidents

• Comfort managing a team spread across multiple regions and time zones

• Clear, direct communication, and the ability to explain technical tradeoffs to engineers and leaders alike

• High agency in ambiguous situations: you see what needs fixing and you go fix it

Nice to have:

• Experience with GPU or ML infrastructure

• Infrastructure-as-code experience, especially Terraform

• Multi-cloud experience (for example, GCP and AWS)

• Experience building or operating Kubernetes control planes or host operating systems

• Experience leading large-scale incident response and post-incident reviews