Senior Engineering Manager, Platform

About the role

GiveDirectly is looking for a Senior Engineering Manager, Platform based in Nairobi (Westlands). You will lead a team of 5 to 7 senior engineers, own the platform's technical outcomes and work closely with product to balance features, tech debt and infrastructure investment.

Key responsibilities

• Manage a team growing to 5-7 senior engineers: 1:1s, goal setting, feedback, career development and performance management, while driving recruiting and onboarding in your first year
• Own delivery, reliability and the consequences of major technical bets, partnering with senior and staff engineers and your product counterpart
• Balance feature development with tech debt reduction and infrastructure investment to improve velocity
• Drive operational excellence: on-call, incident response, code quality, testing, AI and deployment practices
• Protect and scale the engineering culture: open debate, product ownership, continuous improvement and strong engineering foundations
• Represent the team to stakeholders and leadership, translating technical realities into business decisions and vice versa
• Stay close enough to the work to influence architecture and design reviews without becoming a bottleneck

Required profile

• 3+ years managing software engineers through full delivery cycles
• 8+ years of industry experience building production software, with a strong backend foundation
• Demonstrated ability to recruit, coach, develop and retain engineers in a talent-dense, inclusive team during high growth
• Track record of building an engineering culture with candid debate, deep product ownership and high standards of craft and tooling (including agentic engineering)
• Strong technical judgment driven by mission, able to pressure-test architecture with very senior engineers
• Experience partnering with non-technical stakeholders in a relatively new organization
• English; the company welcomes applicants with experience in the low-income and/or historically marginalized communities it serves