Tech Lead and Manager (TLM), Production Engineering

Engineering Manager · Senior · Full Time

New York, NY (HQ)USD 240k – 330k3w ago
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Role

What you'll do.

Tech Lead and Manager role in Production Engineering at Ramp, responsible for building and operating critical infrastructure that handles billions in financial transactions at scale. Lead a team of specialized infrastructure engineers while driving architectural decisions across compute, storage, messaging, and observability systems. This position requires deep software engineering expertise combined with infrastructure specialization, hands-on involvement in production systems, and the ability to coordinate across engineering teams to solve high-stakes reliability and scalability challenges in the fintech industry.

Responsibilities

  • Build and Operate Critical Infrastructure: Own the design, implementation, and operation of compute, storage, messaging, and observability systems that process real financial transactions at scale. Ensure systems handle over $200B in annualized spend flows while maintaining reliability and performance across 70,000+ companies. Establish patterns for distributed systems, container orchestration, database management, and edge infrastructure that become organizational standards.
  • Drive Architectural Evolution and System Design: Lead major infrastructure initiatives including migration to cellular architecture, enabling international scalability and compliance with regulated environments (FedRAMP). Own the complete problem-solving cycle: identify technical debt or scaling bottlenecks, propose solutions, align stakeholders across engineering, coordinate implementation, and measure impact. Partner with product teams during design phase to embed golden paths and prevent reliability issues before they occur.
  • Lead Production Engineering Team: Build and mentor a high-performing infrastructure team, balancing individual contributor responsibilities with people leadership. Establish team culture that combines urgency with technical rigor. Define technical vision, career development paths, and ensure team members grow as both engineers and leaders. Remove blockers and create environment where team can execute on highest-leverage infrastructure problems.
  • Enable AI-Native Infrastructure Platform: Proactively partner with product teams to design infrastructure patterns supporting AI-powered products and services. Define golden paths that transform one-off AI implementations into reusable infrastructure. Anticipate and solve AI workload challenges before they become blockers, including GPU scheduling, model serving, data pipeline infrastructure, and cost attribution for AI experiments.
  • Establish Observability and Reliability Standards: Define and implement company-wide observability practices including SLO frameworks, error budgets, and alerting strategies. Build dashboards and monitoring systems that provide teams visibility into system health, performance, and cost. Establish incident response procedures that focus on root cause elimination rather than symptom resolution, converting each incident into organizational learning.
  • Build Developer Tooling and Self-Service Infrastructure: Create infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD systems, and observability tooling that enable product teams to operate independently. Develop cost attribution, performance monitoring, and reliability tools that give teams visibility into what they build and what it costs. Reduce friction for engineers shipping features while maintaining infrastructure quality standards.
  • Participate in On-Call Rotation and Incident Leadership: Maintain hands-on involvement in production systems through regular on-call participation. Lead incident response efforts, focusing on understanding root causes and implementing systemic fixes. Use incidents as opportunities to strengthen infrastructure, improve monitoring, and prevent similar failures across the platform.
  • Drive Cross-Team Technical Initiatives: Lead company-wide reliability, scalability, and infrastructure modernization projects that require coordination across multiple engineering teams. Proactively identify technical challenges before they become critical, propose solutions, align stakeholders, and see initiatives through completion. Establish standards and practices that become the foundation other teams build upon.
  • Mentor and Develop Infrastructure Engineering Talent: Coach and develop engineering managers, senior engineers, and individual contributors within Production Engineering. Share knowledge about distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and fintech-specific patterns. Create growth opportunities for team members and foster culture of continuous learning in rapidly evolving infrastructure landscape.
  • Ensure Compliance and Security in Infrastructure: Maintain and enhance security posture, compliance frameworks (SOC 2, FedRAMP), and operational resilience across infrastructure systems. Collaborate with security and compliance teams to implement controls without sacrificing velocity. Stay current with regulatory requirements for payments and fintech industry.
  • Communicate Technical Vision Across Organization: Articulate infrastructure strategy, roadmap, and technical decisions to both engineering and non-technical stakeholders. Build shared understanding of technical tradeoffs, costs, and benefits of infrastructure investments. Ensure alignment between business objectives and infrastructure initiatives, translating between technical and business contexts.
  • Evaluate and Adopt Infrastructure Technologies: Research, evaluate, and recommend infrastructure technologies, tools, and platforms that advance Ramp's technical capabilities. Make build vs. buy decisions based on strategic value and team capacity. Stay current with evolving infrastructure landscape including container orchestration, serverless computing, AI infrastructure, and emerging patterns.
  • Establish Quality and Testing Standards: Promote strong software engineering practices within infrastructure code including testing, code review, and documentation standards. Ensure infrastructure changes are reviewed rigorously and validated before production deployment. Balance speed of iteration with quality requirements for systems handling financial transactions.
  • Build Relationships with Product Leadership: Partner closely with product engineering leaders to understand roadmap, technical challenges, and scaling requirements. Proactively surface infrastructure capabilities and constraints that should inform product decisions. Collaborate on architecture reviews that embed reliability and scalability into product designs from inception.
  • Establish Team Processes and Rituals: Define team processes for project planning, technical design reviews, on-call procedures, and knowledge sharing. Create rituals that maintain alignment, surface blockers, and foster collaboration. Establish retrospectives focused on continuous improvement and process optimization without adding bureaucracy.
  • Recruit and Hire Production Engineering Talent: Build high-performing Production Engineering team through strategic hiring. Participate in recruitment, technical interviews, and hiring decisions. Identify and recruit candidates with combination of software engineering excellence and infrastructure specialization. Build diverse, inclusive team that brings different perspectives and experiences.
  • Track Metrics and Demonstrate Impact: Define and track key metrics for infrastructure health, team productivity, and business impact: system reliability (uptime, error rates), deployment frequency, incident resolution time, infrastructure costs, and developer velocity. Communicate infrastructure impact on business outcomes. Use metrics to guide prioritization and demonstrate ROI of infrastructure investments.
  • Balance Technical Purity with Pragmatism: Make thoughtful tradeoffs between technical ideals and business realities. Know when to pursue architectural perfection versus pragmatic solutions that unblock product. Establish patterns that improve over time without requiring perfect solutions on first implementation. Build systems that are good enough to scale, with clear migration paths when requirements evolve.
  • Maintain Personal Technical Contribution: Spend significant portion of time writing code and solving infrastructure problems directly alongside team. Review pull requests, contribute to architectural designs, and stay hands-on with systems. Balance leadership responsibilities with individual engineering contributions to remain technically credible and connected to implementation realities.

Qualifications

What we look for.

Technical

  • Distributed Systems Architecture

    Expert-level understanding of distributed systems design principles including consistency models (eventual, strong), CAP theorem, partition tolerance, and microservices patterns. Hands-on experience designing and implementing systems that scale horizontally and maintain reliability under production load. Proven ability to architect solutions for billions of transactions while handling failure scenarios.

  • Cloud Infrastructure and DevOps

    Deep production experience with cloud platforms (AWS preferred) including EC2, RDS, S3, Lambda, ECS/EKS, and infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform. Experience with container orchestration, service mesh (Istio, Linkerd), and deployment automation. Ability to architect infrastructure for cost-efficiency, security, and operational excellence in cloud environments.

  • Database Systems and Data Infrastructure

    Advanced understanding of both SQL and NoSQL databases including performance optimization, replication, sharding, and backup/recovery strategies. Experience with PostgreSQL, MySQL, or other production relational databases. Knowledge of caching layers (Redis, Memcached), event streaming platforms (Kafka), and data warehousing concepts. Ability to design data architectures that support both operational and analytical workloads.

  • Observability and Monitoring

    Expert in designing observability systems including metrics collection, distributed tracing, centralized logging, and SLO-based monitoring. Experience with tools like Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or similar platforms. Ability to establish error budgets, define meaningful alerting strategies, and build dashboards that provide actionable insights. Understanding of observability's role in incident response and root cause analysis.

  • Software Engineering Fundamentals

    Strong software engineering practices applied to infrastructure code: clean code principles, comprehensive testing (unit, integration, property-based), code review standards, and documentation. Comfortable writing production-quality code in multiple programming languages (Go, Python, or similar). Experience with version control, CI/CD pipelines, and automated testing frameworks. Ability to review and critique code for correctness, performance, and maintainability.

  • Team Leadership and People Management

    Demonstrated experience building and leading engineering teams, mentoring individual contributors, and developing managers. Ability to set team vision, establish clear goals, and create culture of ownership and accountability. Experience with performance management, difficult conversations, and building psychological safety. Proven ability to attract and retain top engineering talent through career development and opportunities.

  • Cross-Functional Collaboration and Communication

    Excellent communication skills for both technical and non-technical audiences. Experience leading cross-team initiatives that require coordination and alignment among multiple engineering teams. Ability to understand product requirements and translate them into infrastructure capabilities. Strong interpersonal skills for building relationships and influencing without direct authority.

  • Financial Systems and Payments

    Understanding of payments infrastructure, financial systems, and transaction processing. Knowledge of payment flows, settlement, reconciliation, and audit requirements. Familiarity with fintech-specific compliance and regulatory considerations. Understanding of how business operations depend on reliable financial infrastructure.

  • Reliability Engineering and Incident Response

    Expertise in designing reliable systems including redundancy, failover mechanisms, and graceful degradation. Experience leading incident response processes and blameless postmortem practices. Ability to analyze incidents, identify root causes, and implement preventive measures. Understanding of incident communication, stakeholder management during outages, and post-incident review effectiveness.

  • Capacity Planning and Cost Optimization

    Experience with capacity planning, load testing, and performance engineering. Ability to forecast infrastructure needs based on growth projections. Knowledge of cost optimization strategies including right-sizing, reserved instances, spot instances, and architectural efficiency. Ability to present infrastructure costs and ROI to business stakeholders.

Education

  • Computer Science or Related Degree (Preferred)

    Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related technical field is preferred. Degree holders have often studied distributed systems, databases, algorithms, and networking fundamentals that inform production engineering work.

  • Systems Programming Knowledge

    Strong foundation in systems-level concepts: operating systems, networking, storage systems, and performance analysis. Can be developed through formal education, self-study, or hands-on experience. Ability to understand and optimize systems at multiple layers of the stack.

Experience

  • Production Infrastructure Leadership

    5+ years of software engineering experience with at least 2-3 years in infrastructure, platform engineering, or production engineering roles at scale. Prior experience leading infrastructure teams or major infrastructure initiatives preferred. Demonstrated track record of owning critical systems end-to-end.

  • Distributed Systems at Scale

    Hands-on experience building and operating distributed systems handling significant transaction volumes or user load. Experience with multi-region deployments, high-availability architectures, and systems serving millions of requests per day. Familiarity with operational challenges at scale including monitoring, debugging, and performance optimization.

  • Team Leadership and Mentorship

    2+ years managing or leading engineers. Experience setting team strategy, conducting performance reviews, and developing team members into senior roles. Ability to balance individual contributor and leadership responsibilities. Track record of building high-performing, collaborative teams.

  • Cross-Team Technical Project Leadership

    Demonstrated ability leading technical projects requiring coordination across multiple teams. Experience managing technical initiatives with dependencies, timeline pressures, and competing priorities. Track record of successfully delivering complex infrastructure changes with minimal disruption to product teams.

  • Fintech or Regulated Industry Experience

    Previous work in payments, fintech, or other regulated industries is valuable. Understanding of compliance requirements, audit trails, and operational controls needed in regulated environments. Knowledge of how regulatory constraints affect infrastructure architecture and deployment strategies.

  • Cloud-Scale Infrastructure

    Production experience with AWS, GCP, or Azure at scale. Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code and automated deployment processes. Experience managing infrastructure costs and optimizing cloud resource utilization. Understanding of cloud architecture patterns including multi-tenancy and isolation.

  • Cellular or Multi-Tenant Architecture

    Experience designing or operating multi-tenant systems or cellular architectures. Understanding of data isolation, blast radius limitation, and scalability patterns specific to multi-tenant platforms. Experience with infrastructure automation that scales with tenant count rather than linear resource growth.

  • Workflow Orchestration Systems

    Experience with workflow orchestration platforms such as Temporal, Apache Airflow, or similar systems. Understanding of distributed task scheduling, failure handling, and state management in workflow contexts. Experience designing reliable workflow infrastructure for mission-critical business processes.

  • Internal Developer Platform Work

    Prior work building internal tools, developer platforms, or developer experience infrastructure. Experience understanding developer pain points and designing solutions that improve productivity. Ability to measure developer experience impact and make case for platform investments.

  • AI Infrastructure and ML Ops

    Experience supporting machine learning workloads including model serving, training infrastructure, and data pipelines. Familiarity with GPU scheduling, containerization of ML models, and monitoring model performance in production. Understanding of unique infrastructure challenges posed by AI and machine learning systems.

Compensation

Pay and benefits.

Base·USD 240,000 – 330,000

Full posting

Original listing.

About Ramp

Ramp is building the smart infrastructure for finance teams, embedded in the transaction flow of every dollar a business spends. We automate how over $200B in annualized spend flows in and out of 70,000+ companies: authorizing payments, flagging risk, categorizing spend, and closing books.

The problems are high-stakes, data-dense, and unforgiving.

We hire people with high agency and high urgency. We look for slope over intercept. We care less about where you trained and more about what you’ve built. At Ramp, everyone is a builder who owns problems end to end and makes consequential decisions that shape the outcome.

The median Ramp customer saves 5% and grows revenue 16% in their first year – far in excess of businesses operating without Ramp. We believe every ambitious company deserves the same.

If you want to build systems that directly shape how companies move and manage billions, Ramp is the place to do it.

About Production Engineering

Production Engineering is Ramp's infrastructure ownership layer. We exist to make Ramp faster, more reliable, and more scalable — and we do that by being embedded in the problems, not adjacent to them.

A few things that define how we operate:

  • One team, one company, one objective. There is no "infra team" and "product team" — there is Ramp. We share the company's goals as our own. When a product team struggles with reliability or scalability, that is our struggle.

  • If reliability or scalability is at risk, we own it. We don't wait to be invited, and we don't ask whose code it is. If a system is slow, if it breaks, if it won't scale — that's ours to lead, regardless of where it lives in the stack.

  • We go first, and we go fast. When the path isn't obvious, we don't wait for someone else to find it. We move with urgency, propose the solution, align the stakeholders, and stay in until it's done — not until our ticket is closed.

  • We lead the way. We find the next problem before it finds us. And when we solve it, we don't just fix it for ourselves — the patterns and standards we establish become the foundation the rest of Ramp builds on. That's not a side effect of the job; it's the job.

  • We stay calibrated. Speed means nothing if we're moving in the wrong direction. We regularly stop and ask honestly whether what we're working on is still the highest-leverage thing we could be doing — the discipline that makes sure our effort compounds toward what actually matters.

You cannot build the future of finance on shaky infrastructure.

 

Our Teams

Production Engineering is organized into teams — but we think about teams differently. Teams are mutable. We build them around what needs to be done, not around what we need to do given the teams we already have. The structure below reflects our current priorities; it will evolve as Ramp does.

Right now, we operate across four areas:

  • Compute — the foundation everything runs on: container orchestration, networking, load balancing, edge infrastructure, and the deployment systems that get code from engineers' laptops to production reliably and at scale

  • Storage — databases, caching, object storage, and the data infrastructure that underpins everything

  • Workflows & Messaging — the systems that power Ramp's financial workflows and event-driven architecture

  • Internal Infrastructure — the platform that makes every builder at Ramp faster and more autonomous: observability, cost attribution, and CI/CD systems that give teams visibility into what they build and what it costs

 

What You'll Do

Production Engineers at Ramp are full software engineers who happen to specialize in infrastructure. You write production code, you own systems end-to-end, and you drive technical outcomes across the organization — not just within your team.

Day to day, you will:

  • Build and operate critical infrastructure across Ramp's compute, storage, messaging, and observability stack — owning the systems that handle real financial transactions at scale.

  • Drive architectural change — not just flag problems. When you surface a reliability or scalability issue, you own the path forward: you propose the solution, find the owners across engineering, and stay in until it's resolved.

  • Partner with product teams at the design phase — reviewing architectures, embedding golden paths, and making it easy to build correctly the first time.

  • Build Ramp's next level of scale — you'll be a hands-on contributor to the most consequential infrastructure shift happening right now: our move to a cellular architecture, enabling Ramp to scale, reach international markets, operate in highly regulated and constrained environments (e.g. FedRAMP), and deliver on enterprise-grade SLAs.

  • Enable AI-native engineering — as Ramp builds increasingly AI-powered products, PE is the team that makes sure the platform can support them. You'll proactively partner with product teams on AI infrastructure patterns, define the golden paths that turn one-off solutions into reusable foundations, and stay ahead of emerging challenges before they become blockers.

  • Build developer tooling and self-service infrastructure — so that other teams can answer their own questions (cost, performance, reliability) without involving PE.

  • Participate in on-call rotation — and more importantly, use every incident as a signal to eliminate the root cause, not just resolve the symptom.

  • Lead across the company — PE doesn't just review designs or show up when called. We proactively initiate cross-team architectural reviews, and we take full ownership of company-wide reliability and scalability initiatives: identifying the problem, proposing the solution, aligning the stakeholders, and staying in until it's done.

 

What We Look For

We don't hire for a checklist. We hire for the instincts that make someone exceptional on this team.

The mindset we're looking for:

  • You can't walk past something broken without wanting to fix it — and you don't stop at the workaround. You find the root cause and eliminate the class of problem.

  • You think in systems, not tasks. You understand that "fixing the bug" is step one; making it so the bug can't happen again is the job.

  • You move with urgency but without chaos. You know when to go fast and when to slow down and do it right.

  • You treat product teams as your users. You build for them, communicate with them proactively, and measure success by how much faster they can ship. But you're also an owner — when something is broken or blocking, you don't wait to be asked. We win when our customers win.

  • You leave things better than you found them. Every system you touch, every process you encounter — you move it forward. Not always dramatically, but always directionally. You picked it up in a certain state; you leave it in a better one.

  • You are equally comfortable reading a database query plan, reviewing a system design doc, writing a Terraform module, and jumping into an incident at 2am.

Experience profile:

  • 2+ years of software engineering experience shipping high-quality architectures for critical systems

  • Strong software engineering fundamentals — you write clean, well-tested, production-ready code

  • Hands-on experience with distributed systems at production scale

  • Experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS preferred)

  • Familiarity with observability practices (SLOs, error budgets, alerting, dashboards)

  • Track record of leading technical projects end-to-end, including cross-team coordination

  • Comfortable using AI tooling and coding agents as part of your everyday engineering workflow — we expect our engineers to leverage these tools to move faster and think bigger

Bonus (not required):

  • Experience with cellular or multi-tenant architecture patterns

  • Prior work on workflow orchestration systems (Temporal)

  • Contributions to developer experience or internal platform tooling

  • Experience in fintech, payments, or regulated industries (FedRAMP, SOC 2)

Benefits available to all full-time Ramp employees (Global)

  • Flexible PTO

  • Centralized home-office equipment ordering

  • Health and wellness stipend

  • Budget for intra-office travel

  • Weekly coffee stipend

United States

  • 100% medical, dental & vision insurance coverage for you, with partial coverage for dependents

  • One Medical annual membership

  • 401(k), including employer match on contributions made while employed by Ramp

  • Fertility HRA (up to $10,000 per year)

  • Parental leave: up to 16 weeks (birthing + bonding) or 8 weeks (bonding only) at 100% pay

  • Pet insurance

  • In-office perks: lunch, snacks, drinks, and more

  • Relocation expense coverage to NYC or SF (if needed)

Canada

  • Group medical, dental, and vision coverage through Sun Life

  • Life, AD&D, and disability coverage

  • Fertility drug coverage (up to $4,000 lifetime)

  • Group Retirement Plan with employer match (RRSP + DPSP)

  • Parental leave: up to 16 weeks (birthing + bonding) or 8 weeks (bonding only) at 100% pay, with additional time available at reduced pay

  • Employee Assistance Program and virtual care through Lumino Health

United Kingdom

  • Private medical insurance through Freedom Elite

  • Virtual GP and at-home care via eMed x Livi

  • Workplace pension through Penfold, with salary sacrifice option

  • Parental leave: up to 16 weeks (birthing + bonding) or 8 weeks (bonding only) at 100% pay with additional time available at reduced pay

Referral Instructions

If you are being referred for the role, please contact that person to apply on your behalf.

 

Other notices

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

 

Beware of recruiting scams: Ramp will only contact you through official @Ramp.com email addresses and will never ask for payment or sensitive personal information during the hiring process.

 

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