Mgr, Engineering - Developer Productivity

Technical Leadership 

• Lead, coach and develop a team of engineers responsible for platform engineering, developer experience, cloud-native development, automation, and operational excellence. 

• Build a high-performing engineering culture focused on technical excellence and continuous improvement. 

• Provide architectural guidance and technical leadership across engineering teams. 

• Promote knowledge sharing and create mechanisms for teams to learn from successes and failures. 

• Influence engineering strategy and platform investments through data-driven recommendations and industry best practices. 

Internal Developer Platform Leadership 

• Define and drive the roadmap for the Internal Developer Platform, ensuring it delivers measurable value across engineering teams. 

• Build and evolve platform capabilities that simplify software delivery, improve consistency, and accelerate engineering velocity. 

• Partner with engineering teams to understand workflow challenges and continuously refine platform experiences based on feedback and usage patterns. 

• Drive adoption initiatives through enablement, education, documentation, and hands-on engagement with engineering teams. 

Developer Experience & Self-Service Engineering 

• Lead the strategy and evolution of self-service engineering capabilities that improve the software development lifecycle and reduce developer friction. 

• Translate developer pain points into platform capabilities, golden paths, paved-road experiences, and reusable engineering solutions. 

• Create intuitive, scalable solutions that enable engineers to provision infrastructure, deploy applications, manage services, and access development resources independently. 

• Measure success through platform adoption, developer satisfaction, productivity gains, and reduced operational burden rather than feature output alone. 

Platform Ownership & Reliability 

• Own the health, reliability, security, scalability, and long-term sustainability of Thrivent's Engineering Productivity platforms and Internal Developer Platform (IDP). 

• Balance delivery of new capabilities with platform maintenance, technical debt reduction, modernization efforts, and lifecycle management of legacy solutions. 

• Drive platform stability through proactive monitoring, operational excellence, reliability engineering practices, and continuous improvement. 

• Establish and maintain engineering standards, architectural guardrails, and platform governance practices that support enterprise-scale adoption. 

Engineering Productivity & Modernization 

• Continuously evaluate emerging technologies, tools, and engineering practices—including Generative AI and AI-assisted development capabilities—to improve software quality and developer productivity. 

• Foster a culture of experimentation, continuous learning, and responsible innovation. 

• Lead proof-of-concepts, pilot programs, and experiential learning initiatives that validate new platform capabilities before scaling. 

• Identify opportunities to automate repetitive work, streamline delivery processes, and improve the overall developer experience. 

QUALIFICATIONS & SKILLS:   

 Required: 

• Strong understanding of modern software engineering practices, platform engineering, Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs), and developer experience with experience building, operating, and evolving an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) at enterprise scale. 

• Demonstrated success implementing golden paths, paved roads, self-service engineering capabilities, and developer productivity tooling. 

• Experience defining platform success metrics, including adoption, developer satisfaction, deployment efficiency, lead time reduction, and friction reduction. 

• Experience improving developer experience through platform engineering and adoption-focused product thinking. 

• 8+ years of progressive experience in software engineering, including experience in developer productivity, developer experience, and software delivery platforms with a track record of improving engineering effectiveness and operational outcomes. 

• 3+ years of leadership experience driving technical strategy, execution, and continuous improvement across engineering teams. 

• 3+ years of people leadership experience leading technical teams responsible for shared engineering capabilities, with demonstrated success developing talent and fostering technical excellence. 

• Proven history of managing high-performing software engineering or platform engineering teams. 

• Strong competency in project management and execution of multiple or large projects.  

• Strong understanding of platform engineering, DevOps, cloud-native architectures, CI/CD, developer portals, infrastructure automation, and software delivery platforms. 

• Experience working with customers to develop solutions to complex business problems.  

• Proven ability to communicate effectively with internal/external stakeholders to support business initiatives.  

• Proven ability to function in an environment which requires flexibility with the ability to make decisions based on limited information. 

• Ability to formulate, implement and evaluate plans, programs and procedures applicable to customer relationship and demand management.  

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or other technical field or equivalent work experience  

 Preferred:   

• MBA  

• Experience evaluating and implementing AI-assisted software development capabilities and developer productivity solutions. 

• Financial Services industry experience  

• Experience in IT planning and business relationship management  

• Experience working in a matrix management organization  

• Experience with product development and management