Engineering Manager, Platform Engineering

Gibson Dunn is a leading global law firm advising clients on significant transactions and disputes. Our exceptional teams craft and deploy creative legal strategies that are meticulously tailored to every matter however complex or high-stakes. The firms work is distinguished by a unique combination of precision and vision.

Based in New York City or Washington D.C. the Engineering Manager Platform Engineering leads and grows the team responsible for the firms internal developer platform: the reusable platforms tools and services that improve developer productivity accelerate delivery and standardize engineering practices across the firm. This role is accountable for the teams people delivery reliability and security outcomes balancing hands-on technical leadership with the management of engineers. The Engineering Manager owns the teams roadmap and execution develops engineers sets the operating rhythm for delivery release management and on-call and partners with engineering and business leaders to ensure the platform meets the firms needs.

Primary applications and platforms include:

• CI/CD Source Control & Test Automation: GitHub Actions Azure DevOps GitLab CI Jenkins; Git JFrog Artifactory; Playwright pytest/JUnit
• Infrastructure & Config as Code: Terraform Ansible Bicep/ARM Helm Kustomize; GitOps via Argo CD and Flux
• Cloud & Orchestration: AWS Azure Docker Kubernetes
• AI Inference & Application Infrastructure: Frontier and open-weight models via Anthropic Azure OpenAI and Amazon Bedrock; model gateways and routing retrieval and hybrid search document ingestion tool/function calling Model Context Protocol (MCP) and agent orchestration
• AI Evaluation & Quality: Eval harnesses and golden datasets LLM-as-judge and human-in-the-loop review regression suites and red-teaming
• Observability & Monitoring: Prometheus Grafana Datadog Splunk Elastic/ELK OpenTelemetry including GenAI tracing and token latency and cost telemetry
• Platform Security & Policy-as-Code: HashiCorp Vault OPA/Conftest SAST/DAST
• Developer Portal & Self-Service: Internal developer portal CLIs/SDKs and APIs

Responsibilities include:

Team Leadership & People Management

• Lead coach and develop a team of platform engineers fostering a high-performing inclusive and collaborative engineering culture.
• Own performance management career development goal-setting and retention; provide regular actionable feedback.
• Balance individual growth with team delivery removing blockers and supporting engineers success.

Delivery & Roadmap Ownership

• Own the Platform Engineering roadmap and delivery translating firm and engineering strategy into prioritized well-scoped engineering work.
• Ensure predictable high-quality delivery through effective planning execution and risk management.
• Establish and run the teams operating rhythm (planning standups code review culture retrospectives and on-call).

Technical Leadership & Engineering Standards

• Review designs and code guide architecture and make sound technical trade-offs.
• Shape platform architecture coding standards and long-term direction.
• Champion a code-first everything-as-code culture and measurable developer-experience outcomes.
• Ensure the team extends platform standards to AI systems including version-controlled prompts retrieval configurations evaluations and release processes alongside application code.

Reliability Security & Operational Excellence

• Hold accountability for platform reliability SLOs incident management and on-call health and continuous improvement of operational maturity.
• Ensure robust pipelines-as-code release-management and test-automation practices that enable safe frequent delivery.
• Ensure platform security and compliance obligations are met partnering with security and governance teams.
• Ensure the platform accounts for AI-specific operational and security realities including provider outages graceful degradation across models non-deterministic failure modes silent quality regressions after model updates inference and GPU cost management prompt-injection and data-exfiltration defenses output filtering and confidentiality constraints across prompts retrieval and agent tool access.

Stakeholder & Vendor Management

• Partner with development teams business stakeholders and IT leadership to align platform investments with firm needs.
• Manage relationships with strategic vendors along with budgets licensing and SLAs.
• Communicate roadmap progress risks and outcomes clearly to leadership.

Talent Hiring & Culture

• Own hiring onboarding and workforce planning to build and scale a strong engineering team.
• Invest in engineers technical and professional growth and support mentorship and communities of practice.
• Promote a culture of ownership learning reliability and continuous improvement.

Qualifications:

• Proven people leadership: hiring coaching performance management and team development.
• Strong delivery-management track record across planning execution and risk.
• Solid technical grounding across software engineering (Go/Python) CI/CD IaC/GitOps cloud (AWS/Azure) Kubernetes observability/SRE platform security and test automation sufficient to review code guide architecture and make sound trade-offs.
• Excellent stakeholder communication and cross-functional collaboration.
• Familiarity with ITIL best practices (incident change and problem management) preferred.
• Experience leading within Lean or Agile organizations (e.g. Scrum SAFe) preferred.
• Cloud certifications and a prior individual-contributor platform or SRE background preferred.
• Working knowledge of emerging AI governance frameworks (e.g. EU AI Act NIST AI RMF ISO/IEC 42001) preferred.

Experience:

• 12 years of experience in platform DevOps SRE or software engineering including 4 years managing and developing engineering teams.
• A strong hands-on engineering background (coding infrastructure as code and cloud) prior to management.
• Bachelors degree in Computer Science Information Technology Engineering or a related field (or equivalent experience); advanced degree a plus.
• Experience delivering internal developer platforms or cloud/DevOps capabilities in a global professional services legal or regulated environment.

Gibson Dunn will consider for employment qualified Applicants with Criminal Histories in a manner consistent with the requirements of local law.

Compensation & Benefits:

The annual compensation range for this position is $230000 - $300000. The salary offered within this range will depend upon qualifications and other operational considerations.

Benefits offered for this position include health care; retirement benefits; paid days off including sick time and vacation time; parental leave; basic life insurance; Flexible Spending Accounts; as well as discretionary performance-based bonuses.

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Gibson Dunn is committed to ensuring equal employment opportunities for all qualified applicants including individuals with disabilities. We strive to ensure an inclusive and accessible hiring experience. The Firm will provide reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities to enable participation in the application and recruitment process unless doing so would impose an undue hardship in accordance with applicable laws and regulations.

If you require a reasonable accommodation to complete an application participate in an interview or otherwise take part in the recruitment process please contact us at . Please note this is a dedicated email inbox established exclusively to assist applicants with accommodation request related to the recruitment process. Inquiries about the status of an application or other non-accommodation matter will not receive a response.