Hands-on Engineering Manager, Infrastructure

Location : 100% remote (EMEA) Classification : Full-time Pay Range : 82.000€ to 140.000€ - determined by several factors, including location Miaplaza is dedicated to making education engaging and accessible through innovative online learning platforms. We develop personalized learning experiences for students, helping them grow in a supportive and interactive environment. Our vision is to elevate online learning by applying the most successful approaches in virtual education to create an accessible and inclusive education curriculum platform where all students can be successful! As an engineering manager at Miaplaza, your team will build technology with a direct impact on the lives of hundreds of thousands of students. Every step of the way, you will have the opportunity to influence our direction. Through our platforms, we create engaging, safe, and thoughtfully designed learning experiences that help children grow academically, creatively, and personally. Every feature we ship, every system we scale, and every improvement we make contributes to shaping how the next generation learns and discovers their potential. If our platform is down, a child might not go to school that day. We’re looking for leaders who want their work to matter in classrooms and homes, who care about access to quality education, and who are excited to craft technology that makes a difference in young people’s lives. Here, your impact doesn’t just power a product; it shapes future generations! What you’ll work on : We’re moving everything towards GCP and Kubernetes. We’re growing towards a scale that no longer matches our legacy architecture and actively investing in modernization. We’re migrating on-premise workloads to GKE, strengthening security and business continuity best practices, and moving toward platform self-service for our development teams. A core goal is to consolidate and shrink the stack, and every migration decision is measured against whether it lowers the daily burden on the team. You’ll need to work with your team balancing both platform initiatives and the operational needs of the engineering teams you serve. You’ll report to our head of engineering and be expected to split your time roughly 50/50 between people management and hands-on development. Prioritization always goes to leading and supporting your engineers. Your team will consist of four engineers. What’s unique about management at Miaplaza: Miaplaza is a US-based education company, which means we probably are doing things differently than you’ve done in your past experience. Here are a few differences you may notice: You will first onboard within your team as a senior engineer for 2 months. You will start to onboard as a manager during month two and will take over the team roughly at 10 weeks. This is non-negotiable as both periods of time are equally important. We expect our EMs to spend approximately 50% of their time hands-on, even after they’ve completed onboarding as a senior engineer. We emphasize the importance of pedagogical principles. A responsibility is to grow your engineers and those around you. One of such pedagogical principles is that we expect you to have full oversight into your direct reports' work; you can’t properly teach if you don’t see the process behind the output. Feedback is the norm. You’ll be expected to give meaningful, specific reinforcement and constructive feedback whenever you notice something. You should also expect to receive feedback. Ultimately, everything we do is optimizing ourselves, our teams, our processes, and our company to best support our students. Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience. 2+ years of experience being a mentor/leader, of which: 1+ years leading a team, formally or as a tech lead 7+ years of experience in DevOps, SRE, or Infrastructure Engineering, of which: 3+ years running production workloads on Kubernetes (GKE preferred) 3+ years of experience with a major cloud p