Senior Software Engineering Manager Jobs in California

Muon seeks a Senior Software Engineering Manager to lead our Software Platform team. This team builds and operates the paved roads (CI/CD, Kubernetes, Terraform, Bazel, AWS, IAM, data infrastructure, and more) that underpin both our internal tooling and the production systems behind customer-facing products such as Muon Mission Command.

The Software Platform team is critical to the overall growth and success of Muon's software engineering organization: as the number of product teams, services, and customers expands, the leverage this team creates, through reduced cognitive load, eliminated toil, and self-service Golden Paths, directly determines how fast the rest of engineering can move. This manager will inherit a team of six engineers, and will be responsible for both scaling that team to meet current demand and evolving it into a product-minded platform organization whose customers are Muon's own developers.

This position is hybrid and requires working on-site in our San Jose, CA office three days per week. 

• Lead, mentor, and grow the Software Platform team. Own hiring, performance management, coaching, and team composition for a growing platform organization. Actively recruit engineers to meet the demands of a rapidly scaling software department.
• Define team goals, and technical roadmaps that align with companies priorities.
• Ensure reliability, scalability, and performance of mission-critical services operating in production.
• Work with cross-functional stakeholders to translate mission needs into clear requirements and technical specifications.
• Drive engineering best practices including design reviews, code quality, testing, and observability.
• Manage team capacity, staffing, and growth, including hiring, coaching, and performance development.
• Promote a culture of technical ownership, continuous improvement, and pragmatic delivery.
• Build feedback loops with developer-customers, prioritize based on real friction, and hold clear ownership boundaries so product teams retain accountability for their applications.

• BS/MS in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field OR equivalent industry experience.
• 5+ years of software engineering experience and 3+ years managing software engineering teams building and operating production systems.
• Direct experience managing a platform, infrastructure, DevOps, or SRE team, including responsibility for hiring, performance management, coaching senior engineers, and shaping team composition.
• Strong technical background in distributed systems, backend services, or platform development, with hands-on depth in Kubernetes, Terraform, and AWS.
• Demonstrated experience supporting production systems with real uptime, reliability, and performance requirements (SLOs, on-call, incident response, postmortems).
• Track record of establishing paved roads / Golden Paths and treating internal platforms as products, with developers as customers.
• Experience running a DevOps or SRE function embedded within a platform team (rather than as a separate silo), consistent with our team model.
• Experience defining technical direction and driving execution through a team, including prioritization, roadmap ownership, and stakeholder alignment.
• Strong communication skills and comfort partnering with cross-functional stakeholders across engineering, security, and IT/information systems.
• Ability to hold clear ownership boundaries, comfortable saying "no" to work that belongs to product teams while still being a great partner to them.

• Hands-on experience with Bazel or another large-scale monorepo build system.
• Experience leading data engineering or data platform work as part of a broader platform team.
• Familiarity with Cloudflare, Artifactory, IAM/Okta, InfluxDB, or Grafana-based observability stacks.
• Experience scaling a platform team through a period of rapid organizational growth.
• Experience partnering closely with information security teams on platform-level controls (IAM, secrets management, supply chain).
• Familiarity with aerospace, satellite operations, or other high-reliability / mission-critical domains.

The salary range for this role is $210,000 - $234,000, plus a competitive equity grant and comprehensive benefits package. Final compensation will be determined based on skills, qualifications, experience, and geographic location as assessed during the interview process.