Engineering Manager- Platform & Infrastructure (F/M/X)

About us

At ablefy, we believe that passion can turn into a career for anyone! With our cloud-based SaaS platform solution, ablefy.io, we offer an easy and efficient way for everyone to create and sell digital products and online courses. More than 70,000 entrepreneurs have already placed their trust in our expertise!

Our story began in 2015, and for the first five years, we grew organically, becoming a profitable company with a team of around 60 employees. Then, in September 2021, we raised $38 million in series A funding led by Target Global, with participation from Partech Ventures and Avid Ventures. Since then, we've doubled in size!

Since then, our company size, products, features, and services have doubled and we have become Germany's No. 1 platform for coaches, consultants, speakers, and service providers. We continue to grow to this day – that's why we're looking for you.

Our mission; to build software that empowers everyone to start, run and grow a successful digital business - borderless, is supported by our high performance principles that are crucial to our success:

• Radical Collaboration
• Constructive confrontation
  
• Adaptive execution
• Collective ambition
  
• Evolving expertise
  
• Empathetic leadership

Diversity & Inclusion

At ablefy, we embrace our differences, as they are our greatest strength. We recognize that everyone has a unique perspective based on their experiences, identities, and thought processes, and we strive to create an inclusive environment for all. Discrimination based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability status, or any other aspect that makes you unique is not tolerated at ablefy. We aim to make growth accessible to everyone!

We know that no candidate checks every single box, and that’s okay! If you’re excited about this role and think you can bring something valuable to our team, we encourage you to apply—even if you don’t meet every requirement. We’d love to hear from you!

AI at ablefy

As an AI-first company, we put intelligent technology at the heart of everything we do. AI is part of how we build, learn, and grow together. It helps us work smarter, move faster, and focus on creating real impact. We believe the strongest results come from combining thoughtful technology with curious, driven people — and we’re excited to shape what’s next, together.

What You'll Build

As Engineering Manager for Platform & Enablement, your mission is to make every engineering team at ablefy faster, safer, and more reliable. You own the foundational layer — and you lead three teams that together cover the full scope: DevOps & Infrastructure, Platform Engineering, and Automated Quality Assurance.

This is a hands-on leadership role in a 9-year-old SaaS platform that is actively modernising. You will be consolidating our observability stack, building the infrastructure for international expansion, owning CI/CD reliability and cost, and leading the automated testing capability that gates every release. Your team of ~8 engineers works in the background — but their output determines how confidently the rest of Engineering ships.

Responsibilities

• Leading Three Specialised Teams: You manage and develop engineers across DevOps, Platform, and AQA. You build shared ownership across all three disciplines, systematically eliminating single points of knowledge and hero dependencies.
  
• Consolidating Observability: We currently run Sentry, Kibana, New Relic, and are introducing OpenTelemetry. You will drive the decision process and execution to consolidate these into a coherent, maintainable stack — improving signal quality, reducing tool sprawl, and cutting cost. Application monitoring and database monitoring need to be unified under one clear operational picture.
  
• Owning Infrastructure for International Expansion: As ablefy moves into UK and US markets, you own the AWS infrastructure design for multi-region deployments — networking, data residency, compliance implications, and operational readiness. This is strategic infrastructure work, not routine ops.
  
• Database & Application Performance: Your Platform team works directly with stream-aligned teams to identify and resolve systemic performance risks — including query tagging, timeout analysis, and database-level bottlenecks that can cascade into incidents. You own the tooling and processes that surface these risks before they become outages.
  
• CI/CD Ownership & Cost Engineering: You own our CircleCI pipelines — speed, reliability, and cost. You track and improve DORA metrics and treat cloud and tooling spend as a shared engineering responsibility. When tooling can be rationalised or costs reduced, you drive that.
  
• AQA & Release Gate Ownership: Your AQA team owns automated testing across the organisation — Playwright-based end-to-end tests, test suite maintenance, and the quality gate that governs every release. You ensure that coverage is meaningful and that release confidence improves measurably over time.
• Developer Experience: You work with your Platform team to improve the internal tooling that stream-aligned engineers depend on daily — from local development setup to deployment workflows. If a team is slowed by platform friction, it is your problem to solve.

Requirements

We are not looking for someone to maintain what exists. We are looking for a platform leader who can consolidate, modernise, and scale the foundational layer of a growing SaaS business.

• A Platform & Infrastructure Leader: You have led or owned DevOps, SRE, or platform engineering functions in a product engineering organisation. You understand cloud infrastructure deeply — specifically AWS (ECS, RDS, networking, cost management) — and you have experience with multi-region deployments.
  
• Observability-Driven: You have hands-on experience consolidating monitoring stacks and building operational clarity from tool sprawl. You know what good looks like — unified dashboards, meaningful alerts, clear ownership of incidents from detection to resolution.
  
• Experienced Engineering Manager: You have managed multi-discipline engineering teams, ideally spanning infrastructure, platform tooling, and quality engineering. You develop engineers, hold them accountable, and build team cultures where shared ownership is the norm.
  
• Cost-Aware: You treat cloud and tooling spend as engineering metrics. You have experience rationalising tooling portfolios, reducing CI/CD costs, and making infrastructure investment decisions with clear business justification.
  
• Quality Engineering Mindset: You understand automated quality assurance as a system — test architecture, flakiness management, release gate design, and the relationship between test coverage and actual release confidence. Experience with Playwright or similar end-to-end testing frameworks is a plus.
  
• AI-Native: You are already using AI tooling in your daily work. You actively think about how AI applies to platform engineering — automated incident triage, intelligent test selection, observability assistance. We are building an AI-native engineering organisation and this role is expected to lead by example.
  
• Technically Credible, Not a Solo Contributor: You don't write all the code — but you earn your team's respect through architectural judgment, the right questions, and a clear point of view on technical trade-offs.
  
• Bonus Points: Familiarity with PostgreSQL at scale (read replicas, PgBouncer, query performance analysis). Background in compliance-adjacent infrastructure (GDPR, UK GDPR, PCI DSS). Experience with Ruby on Rails monoliths and their operational characteristics.

Benefits

• Paid Time Off - 30 vacation days.
• A competitive salary.
• A personal Training & Development budget of € 1,500 per year.
• Responsibility and trust from day 1.
• Individual coaching and further training to support you in your development.
• A free BVG ticket.
• Employee discounts at numerous companies (e.g. at the gym or in online stores).
• Pension program with company match up to 30% of employee contributions.
• A Culture of equity and Inclusion where you are appreciated for the person you are.