Engineering Manager, Kubernetes

Spacelift is the infrastructure orchestration platform built for the modern software era, managing the full lifecycle for both traditional IaC and AI-accelerated infrastructure. It integrates with Terraform, OpenTofu, CloudFormation, Pulumi, and Ansible in a single governed workflow so you deliver secure, compliant infrastructure at scale. Developer self-service, Golden Paths with guardrails, an OPA policy engine, and drift detection accelerate developer velocity while maintaining control.

Spacelift Intelligence adds AI-powered provisioning and diagnostics across traditional and AI-driven workflows.

Spacelift was founded in 2020 by long-time DevOps practitioner Marcin Wyszynski and successful entrepreneur Pawel Hytry, and has raised $82.3M in funding over four rounds from top venture capital firms, including Insight Partners, Blossom Capital, Hoxton Ventures, Inovo Venture Partners, and Five Elms Capital.

We are looking for software engineers who are passionate about building tools. Engineers who want to contribute to every aspect of building new functionality—from discovery to delivery to release—and drive key decisions. We build highly technical products that need a good understanding of our users' problems and excellent engineering to nail the solution.

The Team

We work in product teams (8), a team lead, backend and frontend engineers, a UX/UI designer, and a product manager. To move fast and make better decisions, we work closely and pair on problems and issues. We care about each other. We believe that having Engineers leading the projects and initiatives is the best solution, as our platform is very technical.

About the role

Spacelift is hiring an Engineering Manager to build and lead the team for our new Kubernetes application-delivery product.

Most Kubernetes teams we talk to run Argo CD and want to keep it. They build their own glue for everything around it: promoting releases from dev to production, tracking which version runs in which environment, gating production on approvals and tests, and passing Terraform outputs into application config. Each team builds that glue differently. Our product replaces the glue and leaves Argo in place.

We have an early design, and parts of it will change. You will hire the team, decide with the Product Manager what to build first, and own the architecture.

The product

• Release promotion across environments and clusters, with approvals, policy gates, and an audit trail.

• A view of which version runs where and what changed.

• Terraform and OpenTofu outputs from Spacelift flowing into application config.

• An agent that runs next to the customer's Argo CD, plus an API and Terraform provider.

The hard parts

• For Kubernetes users, releases overlap. Often, a new one arrives while the last is still in staging, and the system decides which ones to push, which to wait, and which to cancel, without leaving any environment with an inconsistent history.

• GitOps repositories vary from team to team: Helm values, Kustomize overlays, app-of-apps, ApplicationSets, monorepos and repo-per-service. The product edits all of them and records every change.

• Argo decides when a change is live. The product follows each commit through sync and health to a pass or fail, and detects changes people make by hand.

• The agent runs within customer networks, some of which are air-gapped, with outbound-only connections and minimal permissions.

• Reviewers need the rendered Kubernetes objects for a proposed change, produced by the same Argo that will apply it.

• Spacelift already has runs, workers, policies, and multi-tenant access control. You decide early what to reuse and what to build.

What you'll do

• Hire backend and frontend engineers, and grow them.

• Set the team's practices for planning, design review, code review, and on-call.

• Prototype early, test the design with customers, and change it where it fails.

• Ship a first release.

• Write down major architecture decisions with the alternatives you rejected.

• Estimate the build and produce a phased plan.

• Run design-partner pilots with the Product Manager.

• Own reliability, security, and quality.

• Coordinate shared components with the Deploy, run engine, and platform teams.

What we're looking for

• Experience managing engineers, including hiring.

• Recent hands-on engineering, enough to lead architecture and review code.

• Production experience with Argo CD or Flux: how they sync, render Helm and Kustomize, and report health, and where they break as teams and environments grow.

• Experience building distributed systems, developer platforms, or workflow engines.

• Working knowledge of Terraform or OpenTofu.

• You write design documents that catalyse collaboration and create a great technical design before you build.

• Strong written and spoken English (B2 or above).

• Based in Europe.

Nice to have

• Go.

• Kubernetes controllers, operators, or agents.

• Kargo, Argo Rollouts, Harness, or another GitOps delivery tool.

• OPA/Rego or another policy-as-code tool.

• Taking a product from zero to its first customers.

• Developer tools or B2B SaaS.

• Contributions to Argo or other CNCF projects.

First six months

• The core team has been hired and is working.

• A working version runs against a real Argo CD environment, and at least one design partner uses it.

• The major architectural decisions are made and documented.

• You have delivered the engineering estimate and phased plan.

How you'll work

You report to the VP of Engineering. The Product Manager for Kubernetes is your peer and owns the customer problem, priorities, scope, and adoption. You own the team, the architecture, quality, and delivery. A product designer works with both of you.

Why Spacelift?

• Innovative Culture: Join a team shaping cloud infrastructure management’s future

• Growth Opportunities: Be a key player in driving Spacelift’s business and AWS partnership to new heights

• Work-Life Balance: Flexible work environment, with remote-first options and competitive compensation packages

• Collaborative Team: Work with passionate, talented people committed to driving success for our customers and partners

• Competitive salary and equity package: B2B contract

Hiring Process

• 30' HR intro call

• 30' Hiring Manager Interview

• Take-home exercise

• 90' Technical interview with live coding

• 45' Final Leadership call with our Director of Engineering

Our values

• We build for CUSTOMERS

• We RESPECT each other

• We take OWNERSHIP seriously

• We succeed through COLLABORATION

• We embrace SPARK & WONDER