Senior Engineering Manager, Core Platform

About the Senior Engineering Manager, Core Platform at Headspace:

Headspace is on a mission to provide every person access to lifelong mental health support. We’re looking for a Senior Manager with deep technical expertise to lead our Core Platform team - delivering common capabilities across all of our Consumer and Business customers. As a Senior Manager of Core Platform at Headspace you will have meaningful opportunities to profoundly impact the future of mental health care for our 70 million users.

The Core Platform team is the foundation every Headspace experience is built on—powering authentication, payments, entitlements, and shared services across our B2B and direct-to-consumer customers. Getting this right is essential to our mission and our ability to scale. We need an experienced leader who can drive the technical strategy, grow a high-performing engineering team, and ensure every product team at Headspace can build on a reliable, extensible platform.

The right platform investments don't just reduce toil, they directly accelerate every product team's ability to ship, and this leader will be expected to quantify and communicate that impact. A big goal needs talented people, so come join us and give your day job a sense of purpose!

What you will do:

• Lead, attract, and grow stellar technical talent
• Develop and drive strategic roadmaps for delivering rich, common capabilities to customers
• Partner closely with product and engineering leaders across B2B and direct-to-consumer offerings to identify where common platform capabilities can replace bespoke solutions, reducing maintenance overhead, and accelerating feature delivery. Translate those opportunities into a platform roadmap with clear business impact.
• Partner with Cloud/Ops, Security, and cross-functional engineering teams to ensure platform services meet availability, compliance, and operational standards, and proactively identify gaps before they become incidents
• Distill complexity for technical and non-technical audiences
• Partner with Principal Engineers to identify architectural gaps, evaluate build-vs-buy tradeoffs, and ensure platform technical direction is grounded in real engineering pain points across the org.
• Effectively prioritize tradeoffs between reducing tech debt and developing new capabilities
• Explore new technologies to support the future state of our business
• Model tenacity and resilience in the day to day

What you will bring:

Required Skills:

• 7+ years leading, building and developing top performing software development teams
• Experience delivering software within a mobile development environment
• Experience building and operating high-availability, distributed backend systems (auth, payments, identity, or similar)
• Demonstrated ability to manage platform migrations or large-scale refactors without disrupting dependent teams
• Track record of building or improving observability stacks (e.g., Datadog, OpenTelemetry, or similar) not just instrumenting systems but using data to drive engineering decisions
• Track record of technical and functional stakeholder management, including an ability to distill complexity for both technical and non-technical audiences
• Experience building and executing on cross-functional roadmaps, building OKRs and milestones
• BS degree or higher in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or other STEM major (Science, Technology, Engineering or Math) or equivalent experience

Preferred Skills:

• Experience as a technical leader with a track record of delivering results and making progress in a fast changing, ambiguous environment