Cloud Platform Senior Manager

About Wind River 

Wind River is a global leader in delivering software for mission-critical intelligent systems. For more than four decades, the company has been an innovator and pioneer, powering billions of systems that require the highest levels of security, safety, and reliability.   

Wind River helps customers across automotive, aerospace, defense, industrial, medical, and telecommunications industries solve complex technology challenges on their journey toward the new intelligent machine economy. The company’s software powers generation after generation of the safest, most secure systems in the world.  Examples include playing a key role in NASA space missions such as Artemis I, the James Webb Space Telescope, and multiple Mars rovers. We’ve achieved recent 5G milestones including the world’s first successful 5G data session with Verizon and  building one of the largest Open RAN networks in the world with Vodafone.  

The company has received industry recognition for its technology innovation and leadership, and for its workplace culture, including global Great Place to Work certification and being named a “Top Workplace” for ten consecutive years. If you want to be part of a unique culture where the lived experience is based on our cultural attributes of growth mindset, customer-focus, and diversity, equity, inclusion & belonging, come join us and help advance the future software defined world.  

About the Team 

The Wind River Cloud team builds a distributed edge platform using Kubernetes, OpenStack, and StarlingX. We deliver highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure designed to operate at scale in demanding environments such as 5G and industrial edge deployments. 

Our scope spans the full platform, including storage, networking, platform services, configuration, and lifecycle management. As a key contributor to the StarlingX open-source project, we help shape cloud-native infrastructure for the edge. 

We are looking for strong engineers and systems thinkers who can work across domains, adapt to changing priorities, and deliver complex distributed systems. Success requires the ability to navigate ambiguity, balance priorities, and collaborate effectively across teams and in the open-source community. 

We value ownership, pragmatism, and continuous improvement, leveraging modern engineering practices—including automation, CI/CD, and AI-assisted tooling—to deliver high-quality outcomes. 

Job Summary: 

As a Senior Engineering Manager within the StarlingX organization, you will lead a team of engineers developing and delivering cloud infrastructure solutions for the distributed edge. StarlingX integrates Kubernetes, OpenStack, and distributed systems technologies into a highly available platform optimized for edge environments. 

You will be responsible for driving execution, developing people, and shaping technical direction in close partnership with your team and peer leaders. This role requires balancing delivery, architectural alignment, and open-source engagement. 

A key expectation of this role is organizational flexibility—managers operate at the platform level and are expected over time to lead different functional areas (e.g., storage, networking, platform services, CI/CD) based on business priorities. As such, success requires broad systems thinking rather than deep specialization in a single domain. 

You will work in a highly collaborative, open-source-oriented environment with a strong focus on quality, reliability, and continuous improvement. 

Responsibilities  

• Lead and develop a high-performing engineering team delivering capabilities for the StarlingX platform. 

• Own team execution, including planning, prioritization, and delivery across releases. 

• Drive career development, performance management, and a strong culture of accountability and ownership. 

• Collaborate with peer leaders to deliver cross-domain solutions across the platform. 

• Contribute to technical direction and architectural alignment for scalable, highly available systems. 

• Manage trade-offs across features, technical debt, and customer priorities. 

• Lead response to customer issues, ensuring strong ownership and resolution. 

• Enable effective open-source engagement and contribution practices. 

• Drive continuous improvement in engineering practices, including CI/CD and automation. 

• Champion adoption of AI-assisted engineering practices to improve productivity, quality, and operational efficiency. 

• Operate flexibly across domains, with the ability to lead different areas of the platform over time. 

Core Competencies & Demonstrated Success 

• Proven ability to lead and scale high-performing engineering teams delivering complex distributed systems. 

• Strong leadership in Agile/Scrum environments, with experience managing cross-team dependencies. 

• Demonstrated ability to navigate ambiguity and shift domains, quickly building sufficient technical context to lead effectively. 

• Ability to influence technical direction without direct authority across multiple teams. 

• Strong problem-solving skills in distributed systems and production environments. 

• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to engage technical and non-technical stakeholders. 

• Experience fostering a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement. 

• Strong collaboration mindset with the ability to prioritize organizational goals over local optimization. 

• Experience working in or leading open-source development environments. 

Basic Qualifications  

• Bachelor’s / master's degree in computer science or related field. 

• 10+ years of experience in software development, with a focus on infrastructure or distributed systems. 

• 7+ years of experience in engineering management in a fast-paced, collaborative environment. 

• Experience delivering complex, multi-component systems with high availability requirements. 

Preferred Qualifications  

• Experience with cloud and infrastructure technologies such as Kubernetes, OpenStack, and/or StarlingX. 

• Familiarity with edge computing environments and constraints (latency, bandwidth, remote operations). 

• Experience in one or more infrastructure domains (e.g., storage, networking, platform services), with the ability to generalize across domains. 

• Experience contributing to or leading teams in open-source ecosystems. 

• Track record of delivering applications for usage in 24x7 production systems with strong reliability characteristics. 

• Experience integrating or leveraging AI-assisted development tools to improve engineering productivity. 

• Strong understanding of CI/CD systems, automation, and modern DevOps practices.