Engineering Manager, Kubernetes (Remote, European Union)

Spacelift is the infrastructure orchestration platform built for the modern software era, managing the full lifecycle for both traditional IaC and AI-accelerated infrastructure. It integrates with Terraform, OpenTofu, CloudFormation, Pulumi, and Ansible in a single governed workflow so you deliver secure, compliant infrastructure at scale. Developer self-service, Golden Paths with guardrails, an OPA policy engine, and drift detection accelerate developer velocity while maintaining control. Spacelift Intelligence adds AI-powered provisioning and diagnostics across traditional and AI-driven workflows. Spacelift was founded in 2020 by long-time DevOps practitioner Marcin Wyszynski and successful entrepreneur Pawel Hytry, and has raised $82.3M in funding over four rounds from top venture capital firms, including Insight Partners, Blossom Capital, Hoxton Ventures, Inovo Venture Partners, and Five Elms Capital.

We are looking for software engineers who are passionate about building tools. Engineers who want to contribute to every aspect of building new functionality—from discovery to delivery to release—and drive key decisions. We build highly technical products that need a good understanding of our users' problems and excellent engineering to nail the solution.

About the role

Spacelift is hiring an Engineering Manager to build and lead the team for our new Kubernetes application-delivery product.

Most Kubernetes teams we talk to run Argo CD and want to keep it. They build their own glue for everything around it: promoting releases from dev to production, tracking which version runs in which environment, gating production on approvals and tests, and passing Terraform outputs into application config. Each team builds that glue differently. Our product replaces the glue and leaves Argo in place.

We have an early design, and parts of it will change. You will hire the team, decide with the Product Manager what to build first, and own the architecture.

The product

Release promotion across environments and clusters, with approvals, policy gates, and an audit trail.

A view of which version runs where and what changed.

Terraform and OpenTofu outputs from Spacelift flowing into application config.

An agent that runs next to the customer's Argo CD, plus an API and Terraform provider.

The hard parts

For Kubernetes users, releases overlap. Often, a new one arrives while the last is still in staging, and the system decides which ones to push, which to wait, and which to cancel, without leaving any environment with an inconsistent history.

GitOps repositories vary from team to team: Helm values, Kustomize overlays, app-of-apps, ApplicationSets, monorepos and repo-per-service. The product edits all of them and records every change.

Argo decides when a change is live. The product follows each commit through sync and health to a pass or fail, and detects changes people make by hand.

The agent runs within customer networks, some of which are air-gapped, with outbound-only connections and minimal permissions.

Reviewers need the rendered Kubernetes objects for a proposed change, produced by the same Argo that will apply it.

Spacelift already has runs, workers, policies, and multi-tenant access control. You decide early what to reuse and what to build.

What you'll do

Hire backend and frontend engineers, and grow them.

Set the team's practices for planning, design review, code review, and on-call.

Prototype early, test the design with customers, and change it where it fails.

Ship a first release.

Write down major architecture decisions with the alternatives you rejected.