Technical Engineering Manager, Platform

Alkami is the digital sales and service platform provider for U.S. banks and credit unions. Our unified Platform integrates onboarding, digital banking, and data and marketing—each solution can stand alone, but together they deliver more—to help institutions onboard, engage, and grow relationships. As the future shifts toward Anticipatory Banking, we help data-informed bankers meet the moment with technology that drives action.

Founded in 2009, we continue to be recognized for our intentional culture and tremendous growth (Best Place to Work in Fintech; Best & Brightest to Work For Nationally; and Comparably’s Best Company Culture, Best Career Growth, Best Engineering Team, and Best Places to Work in Dallas, among others). We’re building a culture where each Alkamist can perform to their highest potential, and we’re always on the lookout for the best and brightest minds. If you’re ready to experience the power of alchemy - transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary - come join one of the fastest growing SaaS companies in the U.S.

As a remote-first company, most of our positions can be remote in the US, except for key roles, which will be indicated in the Job Title.

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As a Technical Engineering Manager (TEM), you are a player-coach: balancing hands-on technical contributions with leadership and delivery management. This role is expected to get hands-on: 20-30% of your time will be spent designing, coding, and reviewing core services. You are expected to lead by example; the rest will be focused on building, scaling, and empowering your engineering team.
This role requires deep technical credibility (at the level of a Staff–Principal Engineer) combined with people leadership skills to guide, mentor, and inspire. You’ll treat the platform and its APIs as products — ensuring they are robust, secure, scalable, and deliver exceptional developer experience.
Your success is measured by the impact and velocity of your team, the quality and adoption of platform APIs, and your ability to grow engineers into the next generation of technical leaders.

Key Responsibilities & Duties

• Hands-On Contribution (20–30%): Write and review code, debug complex issues, design and evolve APIs, and deliver scalable platform services.

• API Design & Platform Ownership: Define API contracts, SLAs, and usability standards; manage API lifecycle from design → rollout → monitoring → EOL.

• Technical Leadership: Drive architecture and design decisions for cloud-native systems, APIs, SDKs, and developer tooling.

• People Leadership: Hire, mentor, and coach engineers; conduct performance reviews; foster growth and career progression.

• Delivery & Engineering Excellence: Define and track KPIs (deployment frequency, MTTR, test coverage, SLA adherence); balance speed with quality.

• Experience Driven: Demonstrate strong user empathy in both design and technical discussions, advocating for experience-driven engineering decisions; proactively bring forward green/yellow/red user paths to ensure solutions account for ideal, edge-case, and failure scenarios across the user journey regardless of direct UI/UX engagement.

• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with Product, Security, Architecture, and Operations to align engineering execution with business outcomes.

• Continuous Improvement: Identify bottlenecks, reduce technical debt, and drive scalability, resilience, and cost-efficiency.

Qualifications

Required:

Technical Depth

• 8+ years in software engineering; 2–4 years in technical leadership or management.

• Strong coding and debugging skills in at least one backend/systems language (Java, Go, C#, Python).

• Expertise in distributed systems (scalability, performance, fault tolerance).

• Cloud-native experience (Kubernetes, containers, multi-cloud, serverless).

• Proficiency with CI/CD, GitOps, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi).

API Design & Platform Expertise

• Expert in designing and evolving REST/GraphQL APIs with scalability, security, and backward compatibility.

• Experience defining API SLAs, contracts, standards, and documentation.

• Familiarity with API gateways, rate limiting, caching, and observability.

• Proven ability to deliver developer experience (DX) through SDKs, self-service tooling, and developer portals.

• Full API lifecycle management experience: design → versioning → rollout → monitoring → deprecation/EOL.

Leadership & Delivery

• Strong people management skills: hiring, coaching, performance management.

• Proven track record of shipping secure, reliable, and scalable APIs/platforms.

• Experience balancing velocity and quality in agile environments.

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Preferred Skills & Experience

• Experience building and scaling internal developer platforms or portals.

• Familiarity with event-driven APIs (Kafka, Pulsar), gRPC, GraphQL federation.

• Experience with service meshes (Istio, Linkerd) for API security and routing.

• Track record of leading large-scale migrations (API versioning, cloud migrations, monolith to microservices).

• Knowledge of SRE principles (SLIs, SLOs, SLAs, error budgets).

• Proven ability to scale distributed teams across geographies.

• Background in financial services, fintech, or other regulated industries.

• Business acumen: measuring developer adoption, API usage, and platform ROI.

• Familiarity with AI/ML in developer tooling (e.g., API contract validation, intelligent code generation).

• Thought leadership: open-source contributions, conference talks, or published writing in platform/API engineering.

What Success Looks Like

• Your team consistently delivers high-quality APIs and services adopted across the company.

• Engineering velocity improves, while SLA adherence and reliability remain high.

• Engineers on your team grow into Staff/Principal roles, supported by your mentorship.

• You’re recognized as a bridge between business strategy and technical execution, helping shape roadmap priorities.

• The platform evolves into a scalable, self-service ecosystem, empowering product teams and clients.

The salary range for this position is: TBDCool Things to Know

Not Just Any Company: Alkami has an awesome diverse and inclusive environment. We have a FUN culture and offer great benefits, including remote-first environment, unlimited paid time off, 401(k) with employer match, and more.

Work Authorization: We cannot offer employment sponsorship at this time. Candidates must be eligible to work in the US for full-time employment.

Recruiters: We are not looking for outside recruiting firms to help us in this search. Thank you for understanding.

Pay Transparency: As of January 1, 2023, new states and locales have enacted pay equity laws that require more pay transparency by employers in the following states: California, Colorado (effective January 1, 2021), Connecticut, Maryland, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island and Washington.

The Important Stuff

Alkami Technology is an Equal Opportunity Employer and Prohibits Discrimination and Harassment of Any Kind: Alkami is committed to the principle of equal employment opportunity for all employees and to providing employees with a work environment free of discrimination and harassment. All employment decisions at Alkami are based on business needs, job requirements and individual qualifications, without regard to race, color, religion or belief, national, social or ethnic origin, sex (including pregnancy), age, physical, mental or sensory disability, HIV Status, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, marital, civil union or domestic partnership status, past or present military service, family medical history or genetic information, family or parental status, or any other status protected by the laws or regulations in the locations where we operate. Alkami will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics. Alkami encourages applicants of all ages.

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