# Engineering Manager, Billing Platform **Company:** [Sentry](https://scaleengineer.com/companies/sentry) Lead and scale the Billing Platform team at Sentry, a critical organizational function that measures, prices, and bills observable events while directly impacting company revenue and customer trust. This Engineering Manager role requires deep distributed systems expertise, strong product sensibility, and proven ability to manage high-performing engineering teams while owning strategic initiatives in checkout, invoicing, and spend management features. **Role:** Engineering Manager **Seniority:** Manager **Locations:** San Francisco, California **Salary:** 220000–280000 USD [Apply](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sentry/9b7ba790-75d1-404c-bf9f-c3776179f7f2) Canonical: https://scaleengineer.com/jobs/sentry/engineering-manager-billing-platform --- ## Responsibilities - Strategic Platform Roadmap Development: Define, prioritize, and drive the Billing Platform team's roadmap by translating company-wide objectives into sustainable technical strategy. Establish ambitious 6-12 month goals, identify key bets and focus areas, and ensure alignment between team priorities, product vision, and organizational revenue targets. - Technical Leadership & Systems Design: Provide architectural guidance on distributed systems design, code quality standards, and technical decisions. Lead system design reviews for complex billing workflows, metering infrastructure, and scalability challenges. Proactively identify technical debt, performance bottlenecks, and infrastructure improvements while mentoring engineers on sophisticated architectural patterns. - Checkout & Invoicing Workflows Ownership: Oversee the team's ownership of critical customer-facing systems including checkout flows, payment processing, invoice generation, and billing accuracy. Ensure these mission-critical workflows maintain high reliability, security, and performance standards while supporting new pricing models and product capabilities. - Spend Management & Growth Features: Drive development of innovative features enabling customers to monitor, forecast, and manage their Sentry spend growth. Collaborate with product and design teams to translate customer needs into scalable solutions that reduce churn and increase customer lifetime value. - Cross-Functional Collaboration & Alignment: Partner closely with Product, Design, BizOps, Finance, Marketing, and Sales teams to translate business requirements into technical solutions. Ensure the Billing Platform team is synchronized with company revenue strategy, supports new product launches, and enables innovative pricing experiments. - Team Leadership & Talent Development: Lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing engineering team including Staff-level engineers. Build a culture emphasizing technical excellence, collaborative problem-solving, continuous learning, and innovation. Create growth opportunities, establish clear career trajectories, and develop future technical leaders. - Work Scoping & Delivery Excellence: Establish clear engineering milestones, resource allocation strategies, and delivery timelines. Decompose complex projects into manageable work streams, manage dependencies across teams, and maintain predictable delivery while adapting to business priorities and technical challenges. - Leadership Communication & Representation: Communicate team progress, technical challenges, strategic direction, and business impact to senior leadership and stakeholders. Represent Sentry externally through technical blog posts, conference presentations, and open-source contributions that showcase platform engineering excellence. - Operational Excellence & Monitoring: Ensure proactive identification and resolution of production issues, implementation of comprehensive observability, and establishment of SLOs for billing systems. Foster a culture of operational responsibility where the team owns reliability and performance of revenue-critical systems. ## Requirements ### education - {"name":"Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or Related Field","description":"Formal education in computer science, software engineering, or equivalent practical experience demonstrating strong foundational knowledge."} ### technical - {"name":"Distributed Systems Architecture","description":"Deep expertise in designing, implementing, and scaling distributed systems that handle high-volume transaction processing, event measurement, and billing workflows across multiple services."} - {"name":"Python or JavaScript/TypeScript","description":"5+ years of professional engineering experience with Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, or similar modern programming languages used in backend and systems engineering."} - {"name":"Financial Systems & Payment Processing","description":"Understanding of billing systems, checkout workflows, invoicing, metering, and revenue recognition patterns in SaaS platforms or similar high-scale environments."} - {"name":"Database & Data Architecture","description":"Experience with SQL and NoSQL databases, data warehousing, event streaming, and analytics pipelines for billing and usage tracking systems."} ### experience - {"name":"5+ Years Professional Software Engineering","description":"Demonstrated track record building production systems at scale, with hands-on experience shipping features from conception through long-term maintenance and operational optimization."} - {"name":"2+ Years Engineering Management","description":"Proven experience leading engineering teams, mentoring individual contributors including senior engineers, and managing team growth, performance, and development."} - {"name":"End-to-End Product Ownership","description":"Ownership of customer-facing product areas from requirements definition and feature development through operational excellence, customer feedback integration, and iterative improvements."} - {"name":"Developer Tools or High-Traffic Platforms","description":"Experience building products for developer audiences or managing critical infrastructure serving high-traffic, mission-critical product surfaces with strict uptime and accuracy requirements."} ## Skills ### required - {"name":"Engineering Leadership & Team Management","description":"Demonstrated ability to lead engineering teams, mentor senior technical talent, establish psychological safety, set clear expectations, and develop team members' careers through strategic growth opportunities and challenging technical work."} - {"name":"Distributed Systems Design","description":"Deep understanding of distributed system patterns including eventual consistency, service-oriented architecture, asynchronous processing, event-driven systems, and scalability patterns required for high-volume transaction processing."} - {"name":"Technical Communication & Translation","description":"Ability to articulate complex technical concepts, tradeoffs, and architectural decisions to both technical audiences and non-technical stakeholders including finance, product, and business teams in clear, concise language."} - {"name":"Project Scoping & Delivery Management","description":"Proficiency in breaking down complex features into deliverable work packages, estimating engineering effort, allocating resources, managing dependencies, and establishing realistic milestones while maintaining delivery velocity."} - {"name":"Product & Platform Mindset","description":"Strategic perspective that balances technical excellence with product goals, customer impact, and business outcomes. Ability to partner effectively with product and design teams as equals in shaping product strategy and technical direction."} - {"name":"SaaS & Billing Systems Expertise","description":"Understanding of SaaS metrics, metering infrastructure, usage-based pricing models, checkout flows, payment processing, invoicing, and revenue recognition patterns essential for building accurate, compliant billing systems."} ### preferred - {"name":"Open Source & Community Engagement","description":"Experience contributing to or building open-source projects, engaging with developer communities, and fostering engineering culture through knowledge sharing and external visibility."} - {"name":"Financial Systems & Compliance Knowledge","description":"Familiarity with financial compliance requirements, PCI-DSS standards, data residency regulations, and accounting principles relevant to billing platform governance."} - {"name":"High-Scale Monitoring & Observability","description":"Background building or operating monitoring platforms, performance management systems, or observability infrastructure at significant scale with experience optimizing for cost and accuracy."} - {"name":"Revenue Operations & Pricing Strategy","description":"Exposure to revenue operations, pricing model experimentation, customer segmentation, and GTM strategy that informs technical platform requirements and feature prioritization."} - {"name":"Infrastructure & Cloud Architecture","description":"Experience designing cloud-native systems leveraging managed services, optimizing for cost and performance, and implementing infrastructure-as-code practices at scale."} ## Tech stack ### tools - {"name":"Kubernetes","description":"Container orchestration platform for deploying, scaling, and managing distributed billing services across multiple environments."} - {"name":"Kafka or Event Streaming","description":"Event streaming platform for processing high-volume event data, decoupling systems, and ensuring reliable delivery of billing events."} - {"name":"Datadog or Similar APM","description":"Application Performance Monitoring and observability tools for monitoring billing system health, performance, and reliability."} - {"name":"Git & GitHub","description":"Version control and collaborative development platform for source code management and code review workflows."} - {"name":"Stripe or Payment Gateway APIs","description":"Payment processing integrations for handling customer payment methods, subscriptions, and transaction processing in checkout workflows."} ### others - {"name":"Microservices Architecture","description":"Understanding of service-oriented design patterns, API contracts, inter-service communication, and managing consistency across distributed billing services."} - {"name":"Event-Driven Processing","description":"Experience with event sourcing, stream processing, and asynchronous workflows essential for processing observable events (errors, logs, traces) at scale."} - {"name":"Usage-Based Metering","description":"Knowledge of metering infrastructure, aggregation pipelines, and pricing calculation engines that accurately measure and bill for consumption-based services."} ### databases - {"name":"PostgreSQL","description":"Primary relational database for transactional consistency in billing systems, customer accounts, and invoice records."} - {"name":"Redis","description":"In-memory data store used for caching, real-time counters, rate limiting, and session management in billing workflows."} - {"name":"ClickHouse or TimescaleDB","description":"Time-series and analytics databases for efficient storage and querying of high-volume event metrics, usage data, and billing analytics."} ### languages - {"name":"Python","description":"Primary backend language at Sentry for services handling event processing, metering calculations, and billing logic requiring strong systems programming capabilities."} - {"name":"JavaScript/TypeScript","description":"Used for building scalable Node.js backend services, user-facing applications, and full-stack features across Sentry's platform."} ### frameworks - {"name":"Django & Django REST Framework","description":"Python web framework commonly used in Sentry's backend services for building robust APIs and internal tools."} - {"name":"React","description":"JavaScript library for building the user interface for billing dashboards, checkout flows, and customer-facing spend management features."} ## Benefits ### benefits - {"name":"Equity Grants","description":"Participate in Sentry's equity compensation program, aligning your financial success with company growth."} - {"name":"Comprehensive Health Insurance","description":"Group health insurance coverage for you and your family, supporting your overall wellness."} - {"name":"Paid Time Off","description":"Generous paid time off policy enabling work-life balance and recovery."} - {"name":"Incentive Compensation","description":"Performance-based bonus and incentive programs tied to individual and organizational goals."} ## Compensation - **max:** 280000 - **min:** 220000 - **currency:** USD - **stockOptions:** true ## Interview process ### steps - {"name":"Initial Screening & Hiring Manager Conversation","description":"First conversation with Sentry's hiring manager to discuss your background, management philosophy, experience with distributed systems and billing platforms, and motivation for the role. This is an opportunity to align on expectations and explore mutual fit."} - {"name":"Technical Leadership Deep Dive","description":"Detailed discussion with team members and peers about your technical architecture decisions, approach to mentoring senior engineers, and perspective on distributed systems challenges. Expect questions about specific technical decisions you've made and how you balance innovation with operational stability."} - {"name":"Product & Cross-Functional Collaboration Assessment","description":"Conversations with product managers and stakeholders to evaluate your ability to collaborate across disciplines, translate business requirements into technical strategy, and represent engineering perspectives in product decisions. Discussion will cover how you've influenced product roadmap and worked with non-technical partners."} - {"name":"Team Leadership & Culture Conversation","description":"In-depth discussion with current engineering leadership about your management style, approach to building high-performing teams, experience mentoring Staff-level engineers, and philosophy on career development and psychological safety."} - {"name":"Strategic & System Design Discussion","description":"Technical interview focused on your thinking around large-scale system design, tradeoffs in building billing platforms, metering infrastructure at scale, and approach to complex architectural decisions. May include whiteboarding or architecture discussion of hypothetical scenarios."} - {"name":"Executive Leadership Alignment","description":"Final conversation with executive leadership to discuss your vision for the Billing Platform team's future, strategic priorities, approach to organization-wide impact, and alignment with Sentry's mission and company strategy."} ## Full description ## **About Sentry** Software runs the world and the pace is faster than ever. Sentry helps developers fix errors and performance issues before users notice, so teams can spend less time firefighting and more time building. Trusted by 200,000+ organizations, Sentry is today’s application monitoring standard and our team is building its AI-native future. ## **About the team** The Billing team sits at the intersection of product, finance, and infrastructure. They're responsible for ensuring every observable event—errors, logs, traces, tokens—gets accurately measured, priced, and billed. Their work directly impacts company revenue and customer trust, requiring distributed systems expertise, attention to financial accuracy, and deep understanding of product usage patterns. The team works cross-functionally with product, engineering, BizOps, marketing, and sales to build systems that enable new products and pricing models. As an Engineering Manager, you’ll lead a team of engineers owning critical workflows such as checkout and invoicing, while also developing new features to help customers manage their spend growth. In this role, you’ll partner across the organization to ensure our customers redeem everything Sentry has to offer and budget for future expansion. ## **In this role you will** * **Strategic Planning & Roadmap:** Define and drive the team's roadmap. Align team goals with organizational objectives and contribute to the overall platform strategy. * **Technical Guidance & Operational Excellence:** Provide technical leadership and guidance on complex distributed systems and design. Ensure the team is proactively identifying areas for improvement. * **Cross-functional Collaboration:** Partner closely with business and technical teams to translate business goals into actionable objectives and scalable solutions. * **Team Leadership & Development:** Lead, mentor, and grow a team of talented engineers, including Staff-level engineers. Build a culture of technical excellence, collaboration, continuous learning, and innovation within the team. * **Communication & Reporting:** Effectively communicate team progress, challenges, and strategic direction to senior leadership, stakeholders, and the wider organization. Represent the team's work internally and externally, including through blog posts and presentations. ## **You’ll love this job if you** * Are a product and platform-minded leader who enjoys distributed systems and software architecture problems. You regard Product and Design as your peers, seeking collaboration when determining product outcomes and technical priorities for the team. You’re comfortable managing delivery _and_ shaping direction. * Have high agency and like to own your outcomes, including defining where Billing needs to be in 6 - 12 months, and translating that into team bets and priorities. * Enjoy leveraging your technical background to inform and validate the team’s decisions. * Thrive in cross-functional environments, collaborating with individuals across many disciplines to deliver the best solutions. * Love to foster career growth, finding opportunities for team members to stretch and excel. ## **Qualifications** * Experience working on a customer-facing product, ideally within developer tools or high-traffic product surfaces. * Experience owning a product area end-to-end, from shipping new features through long-term maintenance and iteration. * Excellent communication skills and an ability to articulate technical concepts and tradeoffs clearly and succinctly. * Experience with scoping work, performing resource allocation, and establishing engineering milestones and delivery dates. * 5+ years professional engineering experience, preferably with Python, JavaScript/TypeScript or similar. * 2+ years of engineering management experience. The base salary range (or hourly wage range, if applicable) that Sentry reasonably expects to pay for this position is $220,000 to $280,000\. A successful candidate’s actual base salary (or hourly wage) amount will be determined by a variety of relevant factors including, without limitation, the candidate’s work location, education, work and other relevant experience, skills, and job-related knowledge. A successful candidate will be eligible to participate in Sentry’s employee benefit plans/programs applicable to the candidate’s position (including incentive compensation, equity grants, paid time off, and group health insurance coverage). See [Sentry Benefits](https://sentry.io/careers/) for more details about the Company’s benefit plans/programs. ## **Equal Opportunity at Sentry** Sentry is committed to providing equal employment opportunities to its employees and candidates for employment regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, veteran status, or other legally-protected characteristic. This commitment includes the provision of reasonable accommodations to employees and candidates for employment with physical or mental disabilities who require such accommodations in order to (a) perform the essential functions of their jobs, or (b) seek employment with Sentry. We strive to build a diverse team, with an inclusive culture where every teammate can thrive. Sentry is an open-source company because we believe that everyone, everywhere, should have the ability and tools to make great software. Software should be accessible. That starts with making our industry accessible. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, you may contact us at [accommodations@sentry.io](mailto:accommodations@sentry.io). Want to learn more about how Sentry handles applicant data? Get the details in our [Applicant Privacy Policy](https://sentry.io/careers/applicantprivacy/).