Senior Engineering Manager, Platform

Location: 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. As an example, 6PM East Africa Time is 11AM US Eastern time in the summer and 10AM in the winter. In practice, if you are in the Eastern US timezone, that means being regularly available for 8AM meetings and some 7AM ones. We know people have commitments like school drop-offs, so you’re encouraged to set a schedule that works for you—as long as there’s sufficient overlap with the team. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of employment Visas in the U.S. or U.K. at this time.

About this 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.

You will own maintaining and scaling a strong engineering culture on your team through rapid growth: recruiting and retaining a high talent density team, and building strong operating processes that encourage open debate in search of the best outcomes for recipients rather than attachment to being right or looking good; continuous learning, improvement, and adoption of new tools; deep product ownership in service of impact for recipients; and strong judgment about tradeoffs. You'll set a high technical quality bar, pressure-testing designs and tradeoffs while still giving a very senior team high autonomy.

You optimize for recipient impact, not the most interesting technical problem. We're not driven by hot new technical trends; we're building the hard tech that matters to recipients — integrations with mobile money rails and delivery in low-connectivity contexts.

You'll own the interface between engineering and team members who haven't worked heavily with a product development organization before. That means learning our programs and the realities of our field teams, and working with partner teams to build our development practices, whether building trust that an MVP is a starting point rather than a final answer, or helping teams see why it’s worth taking time out of their urgent delivery goals to give feedback on a demo or try something new.

As GiveDirectly scales, technology is what allows us to reach more people without breaking. Your leadership means getting more cash to the people who need it most.

Reports to: VP of Technology

Level: Senior Manager

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

Team charters:

We're hiring one Senior Engineering Manager for each of three teams. During the process we'll match candidates to charters based on experience and interest — you don't need to pick one to apply.

1. Payments: owns integrations with mobile money and banking rails, payments orchestration, and financial tracking and reconciliation. A key mission of this domain is to build reliable systems that can move billions of dollars, on top of financial payment rails of varying maturity.
2. Core platform: owns the heart of the cash delivery platform: the recipient and program data model, the web app our call center agents and field managers use every day, and the migration cutover from our legacy and Salesforce systems.
3. Data collection: owns how we identify and enroll recipients: survey and enrollment tooling built for low-connectivity, offline-first field contexts, and, in time, increasingly direct-to-recipient communications. This team’s work shapes how recipients experience our programs – and ultimately the operational mechanics of delivering at scale.

What you’ll do:

• 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

What you’ll bring:

• Exceptional alignment with GiveDirectly Values and active demonstration of our core competencies: emotional intelligence, problem solving, project management, follow-through, and fostering inclusivity. We welcome and strongly encourage applications from candidates who have personal or professional experience in the low-income and/or historically marginalized communities that we serve.
• 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

Compensation

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

This role is fully remote, so if you are not based in the US, UK or Kenya, we will share an estimated salary benchmark for the country you are based in during the hiring process.

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