Platform Engineering Manager, Shared Services

About Us

SUSE is a global leader of enterprise open source software. By transforming community innovations into secure, sovereign and AI-ready solutions, SUSE empowers customers to escape vendor lock-in and regain control of their IT destiny. Through industry-leading Linux, Kubernetes, Edge and AI infrastructure solutions, SUSE delivers the flexibility to innovate everywhere—from the data center to multi-cloud and out to the edge. Only SUSE also manages many Linux and Kubernetes distributions. At SUSE, Choice Happens because we prioritize community, interoperability and relentless innovation. Discover how we power mission-critical resilience at www.suse.com.

SUSE is a global leader of enterprise open source software. By transforming community innovations into secure, sovereign and AI-ready solutions, SUSE empowers customers to escape vendor lock-in and regain control of their IT destiny. Through industry-leading Linux, Kubernetes, Edge and AI infrastructure solutions, SUSE delivers the flexibility to innovate everywhere—from the data center to multi-cloud and out to the edge. Only SUSE also manages many Linux and Kubernetes distributions. At SUSE, Choice Happens because we prioritize community, interoperability and relentless innovation. Discover how we power mission-critical resilience at www.suse.com.

Platform Engineering Manager, Shared Services

Job Description

The Shared Services team within SUSE IT Platform Engineering operates the portfolio of tools the company runs on: source control (GitLab, GitHub, Gitea), CI/CD, monitoring (Zabbix, Prometheus, Grafana), Bugzilla, email infrastructure, backup (Bareos), and a long tail of services under active rationalization. The team's mandate is to keep these services reliable, integrate shadow IT into managed SaaS, and reduce undifferentiated operational lift.

We’re hiring a Manager who can set technical direction, unblock a junior-to-mid team, and bring modern operating practices including responsible adoption of AI tooling.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and develop a junior-to-mid engineering team. Provide architectural direction and technical mentorship. The team has strong ops chops but often needs senior judgment on design and prioritization.
• Set technical direction across the portfolio. Decide what to invest in, what to decommission, what to migrate to SaaS, what's "good enough" as-is. Reinforce the team's tenets: focus on value over polish.
• Own the service portfolio as product manager. Prioritize the backlog, manage stakeholder expectations, trade off feature work, ops, and toil reduction.
• Drive operational excellence. SLO-based reliability, MTTR reduction, structured incident response.
• Lead AI adoption for the team. Identify and prioritize practical Agentic AI use cases such as assisted coding, runbook automation, knowledge retrieval, ticket triage, etc. Pilot, measure, scale or sunset.
• Apply FinOps thinking. Measure efficiency, attribute spend, eliminate undifferentiated heavy lifting, favor serverless and managed services where they reduce TCO.
• Integrate shadow IT. Bring unsanctioned tooling under managed services without losing the productivity that drove people there in the first place.
• Collaborate across ITPE team, broader IT organisation and other business units.

Required Qualifications

• A number of years in IT/infrastructure, including 3+ years managing engineering teams. Equivalent demonstrated breadth considered.
• Bachelor's degree in a technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Strong systems architecture; experience with distributed systems, identity, networking, and how services in this portfolio actually work. You'll be the architect for a team that needs technical direction.
• High tolerance for ambiguity. Comfortable making calls without complete information. This portfolio includes services with unclear ownership, fuzzy SLAs, and inherited decisions. You set direction without waiting for perfect clarity.
• Track record of removing roadblocks: technical, organizational, cultural, etc. Escalations and cross-team coordination flow through you, not around you.
• AI literacy. Ability to lead a team through adoption of AI-assisted tooling (GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, ChatGPT Enterprise, or equivalent). Can scope and evaluate GenAI use cases in an IT operations context and understands data governance and security implications. Hands-on experience using these tools yourself is a strong plus.
• Modern operating practices. SLOs, error budgets, DORA metrics, IaC/GitOps, FinOps. Awareness of AIOps capabilities and how to evaluate them.
• Pragmatism. Reinforces team tenets, doesn't over-engineer.

Why Join Us

• Real ownership of a broad portfolio; you set direction across the tooling all of engineering