Job description
Thinkific is a learning commerce platform. We unite community, courses, and content with commerce, so experts and teams can create transformative learning experiences to grow their revenue. We build products that create impact and raise the bar on what’s possible through online learning.
Our team of 275+ Thinkers supports customers around the globe while working collaboratively to learn, grow, and succeed together. Join us to see how we’re building one of the best workplaces in Canadian tech!
We believe every candidate should have a fair, inclusive, and overall great experience when exploring a new role with Thinkific. That starts with outlining our hiring process so you know what to expect every step of the way—click here to learn more: https://thnk.cc/whattoexpect
Are you a seasoned engineering leader passionate about platform reliability, developer experience, and operational excellence? We’re seeking a Senior Engineering Manager | Platform to lead our talented Platform team at Thinkific.
As the Senior Engineering Manager, Platform, you’ll drive the technical vision, strategy and execution for the infrastructure and architecture powering thousands of online course creators worldwide. You’ll lead and grow a team focused on Kubernetes-based infrastructure, AWS cloud services, reliability engineering, observability and developer experience enabling Thinkific’s products to scale effectively and securely.
In this role, you’ll shape our technical direction, drive improvements in reliability and performance and build a culture of continuous improvement and operational excellence. You will lead a team of senior and staff engineers and work closely with product management and senior leadership to deliver meaningful outcomes.
Your goal is to design and evolve the architecture and build, scale and optimize a reliable, secure, and developer-friendly platform that supports rapid product innovation and high availability.
- Own the platform engineering roadmap, driving strategic initiatives to ensure our Kubernetes and AWS-based infrastructure meets high standards for reliability, security, and scalability. Help define our long term technical direction to bring clarity and alignment across our engineering organization
- Lead and mentor engineers and Staff SREs, helping them manage technical domains effectively, raise the technical bar and enhance overall team capabilities.
- Define, track, and improve Developer Experience (DevEx), using metrics frameworks such as CORE4, SPACE and DORA, ensuring engineering teams are productive, efficient, and satisfied.
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams (engineering, product management, security) to design robust CI/CD pipelines, automate operations and implement secure-by-default practices.
- Cultivate a culture of reliability and observability, championing proactive incident management, blameless postmortems and continuous learning.
- Set and track meaningful SLOs/SLIs, ensuring that observability practices provide deep insights into infrastructure performance and reliability.
- Communicate clearly and proactively, maintaining alignment between platform initiatives and broader company strategy.
The person we have in mind likely:
- Has 10+ years of infrastructure, platform engineering, or software engineering experience, including 5+ years managing engineering teams.
- Possesses extensive hands-on experience with Kubernetes (EKS), AWS infrastructure (EKS, RDS, IAM, ALB, S3) and Terraform-based infrastructure as code.
- Demonstrates strong understanding and practical experience with observability tools (New Relic) and can effectively leverage them for reliability and performance insights.
- Is experienced in leveraging structured frameworks like SPACE and DORA to measure and improve Developer Experience, productivity and operational outcomes.
- Has significant experience leading teams responsible for managing large-scale distributed systems and infrastructure that supports diverse technical stacks.
- Is an effective communicator, collaborator and strategic thinker, able to clearly articulate platform vision to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Brings a deep sense of ownership, accountability and passion for reliability and developer productivity.
These things would also be nice, but we think you could learn them on the job:
- Experience with Ruby on Rails or Node.js in production environments.
- Familiarity with secure software supply chains, Cloudflare configurations and advanced CDN/load balancing strategies.
- Exposure to managing multi-tenant Kubernetes clusters or complex networking environments.
The recruitment compensation range for this position is $169,000 - $253,000 CAD. Your specific compensation within this range is determined based on your job-related skills, knowledge, experience, and our internal equity assessment.
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging & Accessibility
This is just our initial idea of who we’re looking for! At Thinkific, we know that people have unique career journeys. If your experience is close to what we’ve described but you feel that you might be missing a few of the requirements, please still apply! We believe in equal opportunity and are committed to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging across every facet of our business.
We’re also committed to providing a comfortable and accessible interview experience for every candidate. If there are any accommodations our team can make throughout our hiring process (big or small), please let us know.
What you can expect if you join Thinkific:
👏 An amazing team of talented, passionate, and kind Thinkers. Together, we’ve built an amazing, award-winning culture—we’re a Certified Great Place to Work and one of Canada’s Top Small & Medium Employers!
🚀 The chance to build, improve, and innovate on a platform that’s driving positive impact for thousands of businesses and millions of students around the world.
💸 A competitive compensation package including base salary, equity, team-wide bonuses, and an Employee Share Purchase Plan.
🌴 Flexible Paid Time Off to maintain mental and physical health. Our team is encouraged to take a minimum 4 weeks of vacation, plus Thinker Holidays (extended long weekends in the summer) and time off for the December holiday season.
🩺 Health Benefits and Wellness: Comprehensive benefits starting on Day 1 include health, vision, and dental coverage for you and your family, $3,000 for mental health care, a short-term health plan, and an additional health or personal spending account. Plus, family friendly benefits include generous parental leave top-ups for up to 32 weeks, as well as fertility coverage and personalized return to work options.
💻 Flexible Work. Choose to work from home from anywhere in Canada, at our Vancouver HQ, a co-working space, or anywhere there’s wifi for a change of scenery.
⬆️ Learning & Growth. An annual $1500 USD Learn and Grow fund for conferences, seminars, or courses, plus training, mentorship, coaching, and internal promotion opportunities.
🏡 A home office setup so you’re ready to succeed with a company-owned Macbook Pro and a budget to order a desk, chair, or any accessories to help you work comfortably and productively.
💙 A place where you can bring your whole self to work. We know that different perspectives lead to amazing ideas, more innovation, and, ultimately, our success as a company. We welcome applicants of all backgrounds, experiences, beliefs, identities, and statuses. Whoever you are—we can’t wait to meet you!
The Thinkific Vancouver office operates on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and Sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations of the Coast Salish People. We encourage everyone to learn more about the original caretakers of the land that you currently occupy.
