Job Openings Head of Platform Engineering

About the job Head of Platform Engineering

Manatal is an HRTech software service (B2B SaaS) company headquartered in Bangkok, Thailand. Manatal is one of the fastest-growing start-ups in the region and is backed by Surge and Sequoia Capital.

Manatal has a global presence and is trusted by thousands of businesses in over 135 countries. Our goal is to transform the entire hiring process by making it simple, efficient, and enjoyable for recruiters, hiring managers, and candidates alike. Our mission is to offer the best-in-class AI-powered technologies to empower small, medium, and large businesses in their staffing & recruitment transformation.

Key Responsibilities

  • Drive Technical Excellence: Lead major technical initiatives, ensuring architectural soundness, scalability, and long-term impact.
  • Own Delivery: Oversee full project lifecycles from design to deployment with a focus on speed, quality, and reliability.
  • Release Management: Run a predictable release process with progressive delivery, clear rollout and rollback strategies, and strong operational readiness.
  • Platform Ownership: Own the AWS and Kubernetes platform end-to-end, including reliability, security, performance, and cost.
  • Hands-On Execution: Stay close to the work by writing code, reviewing PRs, debugging production issues, and improving core services when needed.
  • Infrastructure as Code: Design, standardize, and maintain Terraform-managed environments and operational best practices.
  • CI/CD and Velocity: Own CI/CD pipelines, improve build and deploy reliability, reduce lead time, and remove friction from the developer workflow.
  • Observability and Reliability: Implement and maintain monitoring, logging, alerting, dashboards, and SLO-driven reliability practices.
  • On-Call Leadership: Build and manage on-call rotations, incident response, escalation paths, and postmortems with clear follow-ups.
  • Technical Standards: Set and enforce engineering standards for architecture, code quality, security, and operational discipline.
  • Team Leadership: Mentor and develop engineers, create ownership, and keep priorities clear and execution under control.
  • Cross-Functional Alignment: Partner with Product and other stakeholders to align platform work with business goals and delivery commitments.

Qualifications

We are looking for a hands-on Director of Platform Engineering with the qualifications below. Each requirement is mandatory for this role:

  • Software Engineering Background: 8+ years building and operating production web applications and systems.
  • Platform Engineering Background: 5+ years owning AWS and Kubernetes in production, including reliability, security, and cost control.
  • Hands-On Leadership: Regularly designs, implements, debugs, and reviews code and infrastructure, and can execute independently when needed.
  • Startup Mindset: Thrives in fast-moving startups, takes ownership, works hard when needed, and brings high energy with a bias for action.
  • Infrastructure as Code Experience: Proven Terraform ownership across multiple environments, including networking, compute, and access controls.
  • Delivery and Releases: Owns CI/CD pipelines, release processes, progressive rollouts, and rollback strategies to keep deployments fast and safe.
  • Observability Stack: Has implemented and operated monitoring, logging, alerting, and dashboards with Datadog and/or Prometheus/Grafana.
  • On-Call Operations: Build, manage and run on-call rotations, incident response, and postmortems, and is willing to be on-call when required.
  • Execution Focus: Sets clear priorities, protects development velocity, and keeps platform work under control.
  • Communication Skills: Communicates clearly and directly, and collaborates effectively across engineering and product.
  • English Fluency: Fluent in spoken and written English for high-stakes technical discussions.
  • Relocation Readiness: Based in Bangkok or willing to relocate and work in a multicultural team.

Working with Manatal

  • This role is based at our Bangkok office in the heart of the city center
  • As a team of diverse cultures and nationalities, English language proficiency is required
  • We enjoy collaborating in person, and the team is working on-site

Why you'll enjoy working with Manatal

  • Well-funded start-up backed by Surge & Sequoia
  • Be part of one of the fastest-growing B2B SaaS start-ups in the region
  • You will be collaborating with talented individuals in the industry
  • Join a lively and highly international team
  • Indulge in a challenging and innovative working culture
  • Attractive medical healthcare plan
  • Personal development allowance
  • 2 weeks of work from anywhere per year
  • Regular fun team-building activities

Hiring Process:

You can expect in our hiring process some or all of the following rounds:

  1. Introduction interview with the HR team
  2. Introduction interview with CTO and/or Director of Engineering
  3. Technical Interview with technical assessment
  4. Cultural fit interview with top management team

Our Tech Stack:

Our engineering team leverages a variety of modern technologies. While working at Manatal, you can expect to be exposed to the following stack:

  • Infrastructure: Amazon Web Services; Kubernetes; GitOps (ArgoCD), GitHub Actions, Terraform, among others.
  • Backend:
    • Language: Python (Django, FastAPI);
    • Databases: PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Open/ElasticSearch, and Redis, among others;
    • Other: Celery, RabbitMQ, among others.
  • Frontend: Typescript (Vue, React)

Learn more about Manatal:

Manatal Hiring: At Manatal, we are dedicated to building an intuitive AI-powered application tracking system to streamline and transform the entire hiring and recruitment process.

We are devoted to attracting the best talent worldwide to join our team and take pride in being an equal-opportunity workplace. We are committed to equal employment opportunities regardless of religion, race, ethnicity, ancestry, national origin, gender, gender identity, sex, sexual orientation, marital or parental status, disability, age, citizenship or other class protected by applicable law.


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