Senior Engineering Manager, Platform

📋 Job Overview

GiveDirectly has delivered more than $1B in cash directly to 2+ million people living in poverty across 15 countries since 2011. We believe cash transfers are one of the most scalable, cost-effective, and dignified forms of aid, with the research to back it up. Our work has been covered by The Economist, NPR, TED, and The Washington Post. We are one of Time100’s Most Influential Companies of 2026.

🏢 About GiveDirectly

Our culture is candid, analytical, and non-hierarchical. We support high ownership and real professional growth. Curious about what it's really like to work here? Read our values and hear from the people who do. If they resonate, this could be a great fit!

🎯 The Role

We’re hiring three Senior Engineering Managers to own domains of our cash delivery platform at a moment of rapid growth: we’re doubling our engineering team over the coming year and expect to hit $1B in revenue in 2026, with significant growth forecast for 2027.

You'll own one domain of our cash delivery platform — payments, core platform, or data collection (see team charters below) — the software product that is at the heart of delivering cash to recipients. We recently launched a platform rebuild as a greenfield project, and the work ahead is scaling it from initial launch to delivering $5B/year. This is a management role close to the work: you'll directly manage a team of 5–7 senior engineers, partner with product counterparts on roadmap and delivery, own the operational details (on-call, incident response), and stay close enough to the code to pressure-test designs and represent tradeoffs in roadmap decisions.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Directly manage a team growing to 5–7 senior engineers — 1:1s, goal setting, feedback, career development, performance management — and build the team itself: you'll drive recruiting for several of your own hires in your first year and own their onboarding
• Own your domain’s technical outcomes: delivery, reliability, and the consequences of its big technical bets – in close partnership with senior and staff engineers and your product counterpart
• Partner with product to balance feature development with tech debt drawdown, infrastructure investments, and other efforts to improve velocity and drive compounding progress
• Drive operational excellence, including on-call, incident response, code quality, testing, AI, and deployment practices
• Protect and scale the culture as we grow: open debate, product ownership, continuous improvement, and strong engineering foundations
• Represent your team with stakeholders and leadership: translate technical realities into business decisions and vice versa, and partner with diverse stakeholders to create the enabling environment for product development
• Set the technical quality bar: stay close enough to the technical work to weigh in on architecture, review designs, and help the team make sound trade-offs, without becoming the bottleneck

📌 Required Qualifications

• Language Requirement: English
• 3+ years managing software engineers through full delivery cycles
• 8+ years of overall industry experience building production software, with a strong backend foundation (databases, cloud services, APIs)
• Demonstrated ability to recruit, coach, develop, and retain engineers, building and retaining a talent-dense and inclusive team during periods of high growth
• Track record of building a strong engineering culture including candid, ego-free debate, deep product ownership, and continuously raising the bar on craft and tooling (including agentic engineering)
• You enable speed through focus and create clarity in ambiguity: cutting through complexity to the strategic kernel and shielding the team from distraction, so a senior team can move fast and autonomously
• Strong technical judgment driven by the mission, not ego: you can pressure-test architecture decisions with very senior engineers, have made consequential calls and lived with the results, and weigh technical and non-technical tradeoffs by recipient impact
• Energized to build product-development fluency in an organization that's relatively new to it: you've successfully partnered with non-technical stakeholders and leaders, and you’re excited by this, rather than daunted by it

🎁 Benefits

At GiveDirectly, we strive to pay our employees generously and equitably. We use an accredited third party salary aggregator to calculate what we believe to be competitive pay based on role, location, and cost of living. We also have a no negotiation policy to ensure we are paying staff equitably across roles. Read more about our compensation philosophy here.

Unless otherwise noted, the benefits stipend may be used to cover benefits or taken as additional taxable income.

United States

• Base Salary: $181,130
• Bonus at Target Performance: 15% (~$27,170, with potential for upside. For reference, with the organization’s current performance multiplier, this amount would have been ~$31,789 in 2025)
• Estimated Total Compensation at Target: $208,300+
• Annual Benefits Stipend: $21,393

United Kingdom

• Base Salary: £124,370
• Bonus at Target Performance: 15% (~£18,656, with potential for upside. For reference, with the organization’s current performance multiplier, this amount would have been ~£21,827 in 2025)
• Estimated Total Compensation at Target: £143,026+
• Annual Benefits Stipend: £2,760

Kenya

• Base Salary: $112,350
• Bonus at Target Performance: 15% (~$16,853, with potential for upside. For reference, with the organization’s current performance multiplier, this amount would have been ~$19,717 in 2025)
• Estimated Total Compensation at Target: $129,203+
• Annual Benefits Stipend: $8,453

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of employment Visas in the U.S. or U.K. at this time.

You must be based in one of the countries on this list and must overlap with East Africa Time and US Eastern Time (8am-6pm) by at least 3 hours.

Must be able to travel ~3-4 times per year to one of our countries of operation for team retreats or field visits.