Usability Engineer Jobs in Oregon (NOW HIRING)

The Team: 

The Delivery team enables engineers at Upstart to ship software to production safely, quickly, and predictably. The team owns the systems and workflows that take deployable software artifacts through release and into production, including deployment infrastructure, progressive delivery capabilities, and the modernization of delivery workflows for Upstart's monolith and distributed services.

Our goal is to make production deployment routine, self-service, and driven by trusted system signals rather than manual coordination or approval. We are building a model where engineers can release changes confidently, understand deployment health in real time, and recover quickly when production signals indicate a problem.

The team partners closely with Developer Platform, Cloud Platform, SRE, Security, and product engineering. Developer Platform owns how software is built and validated, while Delivery owns how that software is released and promoted into production. This boundary aligns the posting to the new organizational model, where CI/CD build responsibilities move out of Delivery and deployment remains within the Delivery charter.

The Role: 

As the Senior Engineering Manager of the Delivery team, you will lead a team responsible for improving how software is deployed and released across Upstart. You will own the strategy and execution for deployment infrastructure, progressive delivery, production promotion, rollback, and the delivery capabilities supporting both modern services and Upstart's monolith.

Your focus will be making production releases safer, faster, and more predictable. You will reduce manual intervention, standardize deployment patterns, improve release visibility, and build automated safeguards that allow engineering teams to deploy independently without sacrificing customer or system safety.

This role is suited for a technically strong, execution-oriented leader who understands deployment systems, production operations, and large-scale platform transitions. You will balance the immediate needs of critical release infrastructure with longer-term modernization that makes deployment a low-friction and dependable part of engineering at Upstart.

How you'll make an impact:

• Team Leadership and Execution
  • Manage and develop a team focused on deployment infrastructure, release automation, monolith delivery, and engineering velocity
  • Define a clear charter, roadmap, ownership model, and measurable outcomes for the Delivery function
  • Translate strategy into capacity-aware plans with explicit priorities, trade-offs, milestones, and success measures
  • Maintain strong operational ownership of critical systems used to release software into production
  • Build a culture of execution, technical quality, ownership, and continuous improvement
  • Develop engineers and technical leaders who can independently own complex delivery capabilities
• Delivery Platform Evolution
  • Improve the speed, reliability, safety, and usability of deployment workflows
  • Standardize deployment and release patterns across services and engineering teams
  • Advance progressive delivery, automated rollback, and signal-driven production promotion
  • Reduce manual gates, deployment-specific tribal knowledge, and cross-team coordination
  • Improve deployment observability so engineers can quickly understand release status, health, and customer impact
  • Ensure deployment infrastructure is secure, auditable, resilient, and scalable
• Monolith Delivery and Modernization
  
  • Improve the safety and efficiency of building, releasing, and operating changes within Upstart's monolith
  • Reduce bottlenecks and operational risk in shared release workflows
  • Establish incremental modernization plans that improve delivery without destabilizing critical systems
  • Partner with application and platform teams to clarify ownership and reduce coupling in the release process
  • Support architectural transitions while maintaining a predictable production delivery experience
  • Ensure changes to legacy delivery systems produce measurable improvements in engineering velocity and release safety
• Self-Service Release Operations
  
  • Enable engineering teams to deploy, promote, monitor, and roll back releases through standardized self-service workflows
  • Provide clear interfaces between Developer Platform build outputs and Delivery-owned deployment systems
  • Reduce support requests and manual intervention through automation, documentation, and improved platform usability
  • Partner with engineering teams to identify release pain points and prioritize high-leverage improvements
  • Establish clear deployment standards while supporting justified differences between service architectures
  • Improve adoption of preferred deployment patterns across the engineering organization
• Delivery Reliability and Operational Excellence
  
  • Establish service expectations and operational practices for critical deployment systems
  • Improve detection, diagnosis, and recovery for release infrastructure failures
  • Reduce recurring deployment toil, instability, and failed-release patterns
  • Partner with SRE to embed appropriate reliability signals and safeguards into production release workflows
  • Use deployment data to identify systemic friction, prioritize investment, and communicate impact
  • Maintain visible ownership of delivery health, risk, capacity, and technical debt

What we're looking for: 

Minimum Qualifications: 

• 5+ years of engineering management experience
• 7+ years of experience in software engineering, DevOps, release engineering, platform engineering, or a related discipline
• Significant technical experience with deployment systems, release automation, progressive delivery, or production infrastructure
• Experience managing critical internal platforms used to release software across a large engineering organization
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, production operations, and software-release risk
• Demonstrated ability to translate strategy into focused, capacity-aware execution plans and measurable outcomes
• Experience leading modernization while maintaining stability of business-critical legacy systems
• Track record of hiring, developing, and retaining high-performing engineers and technical leaders
• Strong cross-functional leadership and communication
• Systems thinking across release safety, engineering velocity, scalability, and operational resilience

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with deployment technologies such as Argo CD, Spinnaker, Kubernetes controllers, or similar systems
• Experience implementing progressive delivery, canary releases, automated rollback, or signal-driven promotion
• Experience operating deployment systems for both monolithic and microservice architectures
• Familiarity with Kubernetes, AWS, service mesh technologies, and modern cloud-native platforms
• Experience modernizing large-scale release or deployment infrastructure
• Experience supporting major platform or architectural transitions
• Experience defining and measuring deployment performance through metrics such as lead time, deployment frequency, and change failure rate
• Strong product mindset when building internal delivery capabilities
• Experience partnering with CI or Developer Platform organizations across a clearly defined build-to-deploy boundary

Position location This role is available in the following locations: Remote - US, Remote - Canada

Time zone requirements The team operates on the East/West coast time zones. 

Travel requirements As a digital first company, the majority of your work can be accomplished remotely. The majority of our employees can live and work anywhere in the U.S but are encouraged to to still spend high quality time in-person collaborating via regular onsites. The in-person sessions' cadence varies depending on the team and role; most teams meet once or twice per quarter for 2-4 consecutive days at a time.

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