Sr. Manager, Infrastructure & Platform Engineering-IT

Description
Job Summary:

At Estes, we are working to change the industry by making shipping frictionless for our employees and our customers. To achieve this, Estes is revolutionizing the way we nurture talent, inspire greatness, and cultivate leaders in aims to be a premier destination for IT talent. The Senior Manager, Platform Engineering is responsible for leading the strategy, execution, and evolution of Estes' platform engineering capabilities. This role builds and develops high-performing engineering teams that enable secure, scalable, and reliable platforms while accelerating developer productivity and cloud adoption. The Senior Manager serves as a trusted advisor to technology leadership, balancing platform health, security, cost, and developer experience to support Estes' broader digital transformation goals.

• Lead, mentor, and develop a best-in-class Platform Engineering team grounded in modern DevOps and reliability engineering practices, delivering against defined KPIs in an agile, collaborative environment.
• In alignment with Enterprise Architecture, own the enterprise CI/CD tooling, driving adoption of GitLab-native pipelines with integrated security scanning and quality controls across engineering teams.
• Champion cloud-first strategies, accelerating migration from on-premises infrastructure to public cloud platforms while enabling hybrid and cloud-native architectures.
• Oversee infrastructure-as-code and configuration management practices to ensure repeatable, secure, and auditable platform delivery.
• Lead containerization and Kubernetes-based operations across development, test, and production environments.
• Provide leadership and direction for operating systems teams, evolving capabilities and practices over time to align with platform and cloud strategies.
• Serve as a trusted advisor to senior engineering and technology leaders on platform delivery and risks, investment tradeoffs, and roadmap prioritization.
• Drive team and talent development, including thoughtful organizational design as cloud maturity, platform capabilities, and team size grow.
• Ensure platform availability, scalability, and security through strong SRE practices, observability, incident response, and continuous improvement.
• Identify and recommend emerging platform technologies and capabilities that support Estes’ long-term digital transformation and operational excellence.
• Foster a culture of ownership, accountability, and psychological safety where engineers can do their best work and continuously grow.
• Partner effectively with application engineering, security, architecture, and operations teams to deliver cohesive, enterprise-scale solutions.
• Champion the established Estes’ TRUCKS values—Transparency, Responsiveness, Understanding, Continuous Improvement, Knowledge Sharing, and Simplicity. Ensure that teams operate transparently, respond effectively to change, understand stakeholder needs, continuously improve, share knowledge freely, and simplify complexity.
• Regular attendance is required.
• This is not an all-inclusive list of job requirements and/or duties and may not contain all mental and physical capabilities necessary to perform the job at all times due to circumstances. Operational, safety and other needs may require the employee to perform any and all other duties as assigned. Employees are expected, and must be able to perform all such duties and tasks.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s Degree, or any combination of education and experience which would provide an equivalent background required. Master's degree preferred.
• 7 or more years of progressive experience in platform engineering, infrastructure, or DevOps, including meaningful people leadership experience at the manager level required. 10 or more years preferred.
• Demonstrated experience leading engineering teams through transformation in fast-paced, complex environments required.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to bridge technical and business conversations across multiple organizational levels required.
• Talent-first leadership mindset with a proven ability to build followership, develop teams, and evolve talent as organizational needs shift required.
• Hands-on experience with cloud transformation, ideally including migration from on-premises infrastructure to public cloud (AWS and/or GCP preferred) preferred.
• Practical depth in CI/CD tooling and DevSecOps practices, with strong preference for GitLab-based pipelines and automation preferred.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code and configuration management (e.g., Terraform, Ansible) preferred.
• Experience leading container orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes, EKS, or Red Hat OpenShift preferred.
• Demonstrated experience focusing consistently on platform reliability, security, cost awareness, and developer experience required.
• Proven experience coaching and mentoring career development required.
• Ability to thrive in a highly collaborative, fast paced environment required.
• Ability to rapidly adapt and respond to changes in environment and priorities required.
• Exceptional analytical, conceptual and problem-solving skills required.
• Ability to identify problems, conduct analysis, and implement resolutions to increase employee and customer satisfaction required.
• Ability to prioritize many competing tasks and deal effectively with conflict required.
• Excellent communication skills including listening, verbal, and written; demonstrated experience summarizing technical efforts and how they align to business outcomes required.
• Must be able to comply with all company policies, rules, procedures and Code of Conduct
• Must be able to interact well with others
• Must be able to work independently, or in a team setting
• Must be capable of working under tight time constraints in a high volume environment with multiple priorities
• Responds well to questions; Ability to read, interpret and comply with written information and documents such as safety rules, operations / procedure manuals and maintenance instructions with a high comprehension and concentration level to include the ability to meet deadlines
• Must pass a pre-employment drug screen, random drug and/or alcohol tests, and will be subject to a criminal history background check
• Must be authorized to work in the United States

Physical Demands:
The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions. While performing the duties of this job, the employee is regularly required to talk or hear. Specific vision abilities required by this job include close vision, distance vision, peripheral vision, depth perception and ability to adjust focus. The employee is frequently required to sit and use hands to finger, handle, or feel or operate computers and other standard office equipment. The employee is occasionally required to stand, walk, lift, twist, turn and reach with hands and arms. The employee must be capable of lifting a minimum of 20 lbs., or more if required by the essential functions of the job.

Work Environment:
The work environment characteristics described here are representative of those an employee encounters while performing the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions. The noise level in the work environment ranges from quiet to loud as required by the essential functions of the job.