Senior Engineering Manager, Cloud Engineering

The Opportunity at Altana
The Cloud Engineering team is hiring a Senior Engineering Manager to lead the group that owns Altana's regulated and sovereign environments. These are the accredited, compliance-constrained deployments our government customers run on, including our FedRAMP environments and dedicated sovereign clusters. You will report to the Senior Director of Platform Engineering and lead a team of three to four engineers across the US, UK, and Australia.

The usual playbook does not apply here. Connectivity and automation are constrained and accreditation obligations shape engineering decisions well before anyone opens a design doc. Your job is to make this domain work like a platform instead of a set of individual builds, so that each new accredited environment launches faster than the one before it, and so product teams can keep shipping without having to absorb the regulatory complexity themselves.

Your Responsibilities
Own the architecture and operation of our regulated and sovereign environments across AWS and Azure, along with the IaC (Infrastructure-as-Code), Kubernetes, and release tooling beneath them
Lead the standardization of environment builds into a repeatable blueprint, so the number of environments can grow without headcount growing with it
Make sure critical technical decisions in the domain are sound, through design review, RFCs, prototypes, and whiteboard sessions, and hold the quality bar on what the team ships
Stay close to the work with hands-on engineering of your own, usually operational tooling or greenfield projects
Work with our Security and Compliance team to embed secure-by-default patterns across your environments and make control evidence a routine output of how the team works
Keep accreditations healthy, with vulnerability remediation inside contractual SLA windows, current access reviews, and data-handling obligations met
Support critical infrastructure by maintaining high SLAs, using progressive deployment strategies such as blue/green deploys, and redundancy with multi-region/HA environments
Represent the team in audits, assessments, and customer-facing technical conversations about security posture and data residency
Own a planning process that produces realistic commitments, and give implementation, commercial, and customer teams go-live dates they can plan against
Build solid operational practice across your environments, covering runbooks, documentation, capacity planning, on-call coverage, and incident response, and take your own turn in the escalation rotation
Own the cost of the environments you run. Understand what drives it, report on it, and prioritize the controls that keep a growing fleet efficient
Translate accreditation and regulatory constraints into terms product and commercial teams can plan around
Build strong working relationships across Implementations, Security and Compliance, Developer Experience, and product engineering, and use them to negotiate dependencies and priorities
Lead, coach, and grow the engineers on your team, with full ownership of performance management, reviews, compensation input, and career development
Manage a distributed team spanning multiple globally distributed time zones
Assess team structure and coverage against what the domain needs, act as hiring manager for your open roles, and work with recruiting to build a pipeline and close candidates

About You
Background in SRE or platform engineering leadership
Experience managing engineers directly, with full ownership of performance, growth, and hiring, and ready to lead through other leads as the group grows
8+ years building and operating cloud infrastructure in production, including time owning an environment end to end
Direct experience delivering into US federal or other highly regulated government environments, such as FedRAMP or an equivalent compliance-heavy program, and a working understanding of how accreditation shapes engineering decisions
Production experience building and operating environments in AWS and/or Azure
Strong Infrastructure as Code skills with Terraform, OpenTofu, or similar, and hands-on Kubernetes experience including cluster management and operational maintenance
Strong software engineering fundamentals. You lead from the front on technical judgment, not just from the org chart
Experience designing tooling and patterns that work in air-gapped and compliance-heavy infrastructure
A track record of establishing operational practice on a team, including runbooks, on-call, documentation, and planning discipline, without slowing delivery down to do it
Experience leading engineers across distant time zones, and the deliberate written communication that requires
Strong sense of shared ownership, a collaborative disposition, and excellent written and verbal communication skills. This role sits between engineering, security, compliance, implementation, and customers, and it will not work for someone who wants to stay inside their own team's boundary
BS or MS degree in Computer Science, or equivalent experience

Nice to have, but not required
Eligibility for a US security clearance
Experience with other non-US national accreditation regimes
Experience taking a compliance program from zero, including sponsorship, initial authorization, and delta assessment
Experience at a startup or high-growth technology company