United States onlyAt Crisis Text Line, our mission is to promote mental well-being for people wherever they are. Our technology powers life-saving crisis support across the U.S. and around the world, connecting people to help when they need it most. As we continue to scale our global impact, we’re looking for an exceptional Senior Engineering Manager to lead our Platform (CAT) engineering team.
In this role, you’ll help shape the future of our Crisis Care Platform—guiding our transition from legacy PHP systems to Go-based services, advancing our API-first architecture, and strengthening reliability, observability, and delivery practices. You’ll bring deep architectural insight, platform engineering expertise, and thoughtful people leadership to support a high-performing team building systems that enable life-saving support at scale.
You’ll be part of our Build department, which brings together engineering, product, and design to:
- Deliver the most trusted, innovative, and easy-to-use crisis care platform in the industry.
- Create an experience where every user feels a sense of community, trust, and support.
- Empower global affiliates to run crisis support operations efficiently and adaptively.
- Develop a services/API-first architecture that integrates federated data and predictive insights across the platform.
This is more than a technical leadership role — it’s an opportunity to help build technology that truly makes a difference.
Responsibilities
Technical Leadership
- Lead the modernization of core platform services (PHP → Go), defining service boundaries, architectural patterns, and dependency sequencing across routing, counselor tools, and shared services.
- Standardize CI/CD, deployments, observability, logging, and telemetry across AWS- and Go-based environments to enable reliable, predictable operations.
Platform Maturity
- Establish SLAs, incident management practices, performance baselines, and monitoring frameworks to strengthen system resilience, reliability, and error visibility.
- Drive platform maturity from ~2/5 to ~4/5 by implementing engineering standards, documentation patterns, and consistent service quality across the squad.
- Own the technology strategy and develop a plan to modernize core platform services (PHP → Go), defining service boundaries, architectural patterns, and dependency sequencing across the CTL platform, volunteer management lifecycle, and other core services.
Shipping Features
- Own the execution and delivery of client-facing features by leading an engineering team committed to quality, velocity, and customer impact.
- Own the technology strategy and develop a plan to modernize core platform services (PHP → Go), defining service boundaries, architectural patterns, and dependency sequencing across the CTL platform, volunteer management lifecycle, and other core services.
Cross-functional Collaboration
- Partner with Product, Developer Platform, DevOps/SRE, and Security to align on shared infrastructure, governance, roadmap priorities, and technical dependencies.
- Collaborate with Data Engineering, Research, and Analytics to ensure cross-service reliability, performant data flows, and architectural alignment across the Build department.
Leadership & Team Development
- Lead and mentor a team of 6–8 engineers, supporting growth in architectural thinking, system ownership, delivery discipline, and engineering excellence.
- Set clear expectations, provide thoughtful and actionable feedback, and cultivate a culture of reliability, autonomy, innovation, and strong documentation practices.
- Serve as a coaching-focused, people-first leader who brings structure, clarity, and calm to complex platform and migration work.
- Communicate with empathy while maintaining high standards, thriving in ambiguity, and modeling the team’s expected documentation, reliability, and engineering discipline.
Qualifications
Required
- 5+ years of experience building and supporting backend or platform systems in production.
- 3+ years of engineering management experience, leading teams, and driving delivery.
- Experience in modernizing legacy systems and leading migrations (e.g., PHP → Go, monolith → services).
- A strong understanding of distributed systems, API-first architecture, and service design.
- Hands-on experience with AWS, Terraform, CI/CD pipelines, GraphQL, and relational databases.
- Able to coach teams on AWS best practices, owning reliability, cost, and security posture.
- Commitment to engineering quality, including experience establishing automated testing practices and integrating modern test frameworks (e.g., Playwright, unit/integration testing, contract testing) into team workflows.
- Experience improving reliability and observability — logging, monitoring, telemetry, and performance tuning.
- Strong skills in planning, prioritization, and execution, especially in sprint-based environments.
- Excellent communication skills and ability to work well with technical and non-technical partners.
Preferred
- Familiarity with Go, PHP, and React at an architectural level (coding not required).
- Experience leading modernization efforts in complex or high-impact environments.
- Balance innovation, reliability, and technical debt in decision-making.
Reliable High-Speed Internet Required: Must have a stable high-speed internet connection to support seamless remote collaboration, virtual meetings, online job tasks, etc.
The full salary range for this position, across all United States geographies, is $135,520 to $178,060. The upper portion of the salary range is typically reserved for existing employees who demonstrate strong performance over time. Starting salary will vary by location, qualifications, and prior experience; during the interview process, candidates will learn the starting salary range applicable for their location. We pay competitively in the tech-forward nonprofit space and offer a robust benefits package.
This is a remote-only position
Please note: The following eligibility applies to U.S.-based roles only.
Only candidates in the following states will be eligible for employment: CO, CT, FL, GA, IL, IN, MD, MA, MI, NJ, NM, NY, NC, PA, TN, TX, UT, VA, WA.
