Manager, Embedded Platform Engineering

Overview

We are seeking a Manager, Embedded Platform Engineering to lead a team focused on making platform engineering successful where it matters most: with the engineering teams building and operating our products. 

The Embedded Platform Engineering team partners directly with product, application, data, integration, and other engineering teams to adopt and evolve shared platform capabilities. Rather than operating as a traditional support organization, the team works alongside engineers to establish modern engineering practices, accelerate platform adoption, remove developer friction, and bring real-world feedback into the platform roadmap. 

This is a high-profile, highly collaborative leadership role with significant visibility across the technology organization. The manager will engage with engineering leaders, architects, product teams, security, infrastructure, and other stakeholders to execute platform strategy. 

Success is not simply measured by deploying tools. It is measured by creating an amazing developer experience in which teams can build, deploy, observe, operate, and improve their services safely and efficiently. 

The Embedded Platform Engineering team is a dedicated engineering organization, not floating or ticket-based support. Its role is both technical and cultural: helping teams adopt self-service capabilities, golden paths, and SLO-driven operational practices while developing sustainable ownership within product teams.


What you’ll do

Become part of an iconic brand that is set to revolutionize the electric pick-up truck & rugged SUV marketplace by achieving the following:

Lead and Grow the Embedded Platform Engineering Team 

• Lead, coach, and develop a team of platform engineers working directly with engineering organizations. 
• Establish clear technical direction, priorities, engineering standards, and expectations for the team. 
• Create a culture of ownership, collaboration, continuous improvement, and customer-focused engineering. 
• Support professional growth through mentoring, feedback, technical leadership, and career development. 
• Build a team capable of balancing hands-on engineering, technical consultation, platform enablement, and stakeholder engagement. 
• Establish clear operating models among Embedded Platform Engineering, Core Platform Engineering, and product engineering teams. 
• Keep the team focused on repeatable platform improvements rather than becoming a long-term substitute for product-team ownership. 

Drive Platform Adoption 

• Partner directly with engineering teams to understand delivery challenges and help them adopt common platform capabilities and practices. 
• Embed platform engineers with teams when needed to accelerate adoption and establish sustainable engineering patterns. 
• Help teams move from bespoke, manually operated implementations toward reusable, automated, and self-service platform capabilities. 
• Promote paved roads and golden paths that make secure, reliable, and supportable delivery the easiest option for engineers. 
• Identify recurring friction and translate those findings into improvements to the shared platform. 
• Work closely with Core Platform Engineering so product-team feedback influences platform capabilities, priorities, and roadmap decisions. 
• Define measurable outcomes for platform adoption, developer experience, engineering efficiency, and service reliability. 

Champion Developer Experience 

• Make developer experience a first-class engineering outcome. 
• Reduce unnecessary cognitive load and friction in infrastructure provisioning, software builds, deployments, observability, and production operations. 
• Promote automation, paved roads, reusable patterns, documentation, and self-service experiences wherever practical. 
• Balance standardization, security, governance, and operational requirements with the practical needs of engineering teams. 
• Establish feedback mechanisms that identify where developers struggle and where platform capabilities should evolve. 
• Simplify onboarding, local development, testing, deployment, production readiness, and ongoing service operations. 

Lead Modern Cloud and Delivery Practices 

• Provide technical leadership for AWS-based platform architecture and cloud-native engineering. 
• Guide teams in adopting modern CI/CD and GitOps practices using GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, and Kargo. 
• Drive Infrastructure as Code and platform automation using Terraform and Crossplane. 
• Promote effective use of Docker, Kubernetes, declarative configuration, and automated software-delivery patterns. 
• Help teams design secure, resilient, observable, and supportable production services. 
• Partner with architecture, security, operations, and engineering stakeholders to establish reusable technical standards. 

Build Reliability into the Developer Experience 

• Establish reliability as a shared responsibility between platform and product teams. 
• Help teams define meaningful Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs). 
• Use error budgets to inform tradeoffs among reliability, operational risk, technical debt, and delivery velocity. 
• Encourage teams to design for observability, resilience, operational readiness, and supportability from the beginning. 
• Help teams establish appropriate health signals, alerts, dashboards, runbooks, and production-readiness criteria. 
• Guide teams in learning from incidents and translating findings into platform and application improvements. 

Engage and Influence Across the Organization 

• Develop strong relationships with engineering managers, product leaders, architects, security teams, infrastructure teams, and senior technology leaders. 
• Communicate platform strategy and technical direction to engineering and non-engineering audiences. 
• Build alignment among stakeholders with different priorities, constraints, and levels of technical understanding. 
• Partner with Platform leaders on planning activities 
• Promote adoption of established engineering practices 
• Serve as a trusted advisor on platform engineering, developer experience, cloud-native architecture, Kubernetes, software delivery, and service reliability. 

 

Location & Travel Expectations:

• This role will be based out of the Scout Motors corporate headquarters in Charlotte, NC. 
• This role requires 4-5 days per week in the office, with regular in-person meetings and events. 
• Applicants should expect that the role will require the ability to convene with Scout colleagues in person and travel to participate in events on behalf of the company from time to time.

What you’ll bring 

We expect all Scout employees to have integrity, curiosity, resourcefulness, and strive to exhibit a positive attitude, as well as a growth mindset. You’ll be comfortable with change and flexible in a fast-paced, high-growth environment. You’ll take a collaborative approach to achieve ambitious goals. Here's what else you'll bring:

• We are looking for a leader who combines strong engineering judgment with the ability to develop people, influence teams, and drive organizational change.
• This role requires a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field and 7+ years of relevant experience.

Leadership and Collaboration 

• Experience leading, developing, and mentoring engineers in Platform Engineering, DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, Cloud Engineering, or a related discipline. 
• Experience managing engineers who work across multiple product teams, technical domains, or organizational boundaries. 
• A track record of building strong engineering teams and creating an environment of accountability, learning, collaboration, and continuous improvement. 
• Strong ability to build relationships and influence stakeholders throughout a complex organization. 
• Experience working with engineering teams as internal customers and translating their needs into platform improvements. 
• A coaching mindset that helps teams learn and adopt sustainable engineering practices rather than simply handing them solutions. 
• Ability to balance strategic leadership, people management, stakeholder engagement, and technical decision-making. 
• Strong judgment when balancing developer velocity, reliability, security, standardization, and operational risk. 

Technical Experience 

• Strong experience with AWS and cloud-native architectures. 
• Deep understanding of CI/CD, GitOps, and modern software-delivery practices. 
• Hands-on experience with GitHub and GitHub Actions. 
• Experience with ArgoCD and preferably Kargo. 
• Strong experience with Docker and containerized application development and delivery. 
• Deep production experience with Kubernetes, including designing, deploying, operating, troubleshooting, and evolving Kubernetes-based platforms supporting business-critical workloads. 
• Demonstrated experience addressing the operational realities of production Kubernetes, including availability, resiliency, networking, security, observability, upgrades, capacity management, incident response, performance, and complex production troubleshooting. 
• Experience establishing Kubernetes architecture, operational standards, reusable deployment patterns, guardrails, and self-service capabilities that enable application teams to operate workloads safely without requiring deep Kubernetes or infrastructure expertise. 
• Ability to guide teams through Kubernetes production-readiness decisions and distinguish among application, platform, cluster, networking, infrastructure, and external-service failures. 
• Strong understanding of Infrastructure as Code using Terraform. 
• Experience with Crossplane and declarative infrastructure or platform APIs. 
• Experience with observability, telemetry, logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting practices, including OpenTelemetry or comparable technologies. 
• Experience with scripting or automation languages such as Python, Shell, or Go. 
• Experience creating reusable platform services, templates, golden paths, or internal developer-platform capabilities. 
• Understanding of security, identity, secrets management, policy enforcement, and governance in cloud-native environments. 

Reliability Engineering 

• Strong understanding of SLIs, SLOs, Service Level Agreements, and error budgets. 
• Experience helping engineering teams establish measurable reliability objectives. 
• Experience using reliability data to inform engineering priorities and release decisions. 
• Understanding of production-readiness reviews, incident response, post-incident learning, availability, resilience, and operational risk. 
• Ability to balance reliability, security, developer velocity, cost, and operational complexity. 
• Experience promoting service ownership and helping engineering teams take responsibility for production operation of their applications. 

Preferred Qualifications 

• Experience leading an embedded, enablement, consulting, or platform-adoption engineering team. 
• Experience building or operating an internal developer platform. 
• Experience establishing golden paths, paved roads, service templates, or self-service engineering capabilities. 
• Experience leading organizational adoption of GitOps, Infrastructure as Code, Kubernetes, observability, or SRE practices. 
• Experience working with Backstage or another internal developer portal. 
• Understanding of software-supply-chain security and cloud-native security practices. 
• Experience developing metrics for platform adoption, developer satisfaction, delivery performance, reliability, and operational health. 
• Experience with AI-assisted software delivery or developer-productivity tools. 

What Success Looks Like 

Engineering teams want to use the platform not simply because they are required to, but because it makes their work easier, faster, safer, and more reliable. 

Product teams increasingly use common infrastructure, deployment, observability, reliability, and operational patterns. Platform capabilities become self-service wherever practical. Engineers spend less time solving repetitive infrastructure and delivery problems and more time creating valuable product capabilities. 

Embedded Platform Engineering develops strong partnerships with product teams while avoiding permanent dependency. Teams gain the knowledge, tools, patterns, and confidence needed to own their services in production. Feedback from embedded engineers continuously improves the core platform, and platform improvements address needs shared across multiple teams rather than isolated use cases.

What you'll gain

The benefits of joining Scout include the chance to build products and a company from the ground up.  This is a chance to create something new and lasting – with an iconic brand at its foundation.  In addition, Scout provides competitive compensation and benefits to support your physical, mental, and financial wellbeing. Program specifics are detailed in company policies and employee benefit guides, select highlights:

• Competitive insurance including:
  • Medical, dental, vision and income protection plans
• 401(k) program with:
  • An employer match and immediate vesting
• Generous Paid Time Off including:
  • 20 days planned PTO, as accrued
  • 40 hours of unplanned PTO and 14 company or floating holidays, annually
  • Up to 16 weeks of paid parental leave for biological and adoptive parents of all genders
  • Paid leave for circumstances related to bereavement, jury duty, voting time, or military leave
• Corporate Vehicle Program with:
  • Eligibility for 1 assigned vehicle
  • A mobility stipend

Pay Transparency

This is a full-time, exempt position eligible to receive a base salary and to participate in an annual performance bonus program. Final salary offered will be determined based on factors including but not limited to the candidate's skills and experience. The annual performance bonus program is preset and not candidate dependent.

Initial base salary range = $160,000.00 - $192,500.00

Internal leveling code: M8