Swiftly is the AI platform purpose-built for retail, serving retailers, wholesalers, and brands. Swiftly's AI agents unify data, automate workflows, and power the marketing that drives measurable business growth. Swiftly AI is built on the industry's largest proprietary retail dataset: live transactions, 9 million products, and the closed-loop campaign outcomes of 33,000 stores.
Trusted by leading retailers, wholesalers, and hundreds of iconic brands, Swiftly unifies data across the retail ecosystem to accelerate growth and power the connected, personalized experiences that drive lasting shopper loyalty.
Position Summary:
Swiftly is searching for a Manager of Infrastructure Engineering to lead a small infrastructure team responsible for operating and modernizing our production platform. This is a hands-on player-coach role with an approximately 50/50 split between individual technical contribution and people management. In practice, this role will personally execute important infrastructure initiatives while also setting direction, coaching engineers, and ensuring strong team delivery. The manager will help complete our remaining infrastructure modernization, improve reliability and developer experience, and contribute directly to the technical work required to move key initiatives forward. We are a fast-moving startup, so this role requires strong pragmatic judgment. The right leader can distinguish urgent production risks from important but deferrable improvements, balance reliability and security with engineering capacity and business priorities, and create appropriate guardrails without unnecessarily slowing down development.
The manager will partner closely with engineering, security, compliance, and other technical leaders. Success in this role comes from delivering infrastructure outcomes, creating clarity, and reducing operational and coordination overhead for the broader engineering organization. As an AI-native company, we expect engineering leaders to use AI tooling effectively to accelerate delivery and reduce operational toil.
Strong preference for candidates based in Pacific to Central time zones to support real-time collaboration with our core team.
Responsibilities Include:
Balance approximately 50% hands-on individual contribution with 50% people management, directly delivering infrastructure work while leading and developing a small Infrastructure Engineering team
Own the reliability and modernization of Swiftly's production infrastructure, including our Kubernetes-based platform on Azure and the remaining migration away from legacy infrastructure
Act as a true player-coach, personally driving important infrastructure initiatives through implementation and completion while also setting priorities, coaching engineers, and creating clear accountability
Make pragmatic infrastructure decisions based on business impact, balancing reliability, security, technical debt, engineering capacity, and product priorities in a fast-moving startup environment
Partner effectively with engineering, security, compliance, and other stakeholders to deliver the infrastructure work needed by the business while keeping ownership boundaries and next steps clear
Champion AI-native engineering practices on the team, including the adoption of AI coding assistants and AI-assisted operations to accelerate delivery and reduce toil
Other related duties as assigned
Required Qualifications:
Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field
7+ years of experience in infrastructure, platform, SRE, or software engineering, including 2+ years managing engineers
Recent hands-on experience operating production Kubernetes environments in Azure or a comparable public cloud
Strong hands-on experience with infrastructure-as-code and modern CI/CD practices, including Argo, Terraform and GitHub-based deployment workflows
Experience leading meaningful infrastructure modernization, migration, reliability, or operational improvement initiatives through completion
Demonstrated ability to lead and develop engineers while maintaining a substantial hands-on technical contribution, ideally in a role split approximately evenly between individual contributor work and people management
Strong judgment in ambiguous, fast-moving environments, with the ability to balance reliability, security, technical debt, engineering capacity, and business priorities
Strong communication and collaboration skills, including the ability to work with others remotely and effectively across engineering teams and turn technical concerns into clear, actionable recommendations
Hands-on fluency with modern AI development tooling (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot) and a track record of using AI to increase engineering throughput
Ability to thrive in an ambiguous, fast-paced environment, manage competing priorities, and make sound pragmatic calls
This position is not eligible for visa sponsorship. Applicants must be authorized to work in the U.S. without the need for current or future sponsorship
Preferred Qualifications:
Experience operating infrastructure on Azure, particularly AKS and other cloud-native platform services
Familiarity with Swiftly's infrastructure tooling and patterns, such as ArgoCD, HashiCorp Vault, Grafana, and PostgreSQL
Experience partnering with security and compliance teams to implement infrastructure controls for programs such as SOC 2 or ISO 27001
Experience using AI-assisted development and operations tooling to improve engineering productivity and reduce operational toil
#LI-Remote
Note: This position is not eligible for visa sponsorship. Applicants must be authorized to work in the U.S. without the need for current or future sponsorship.
Working For Swiftly
We are working on a set of problems that require the best in the industry to get right. Our employees are the pillars of the future of the company and they are treated and compensated as such. We're a growing team of experienced industry professionals building an organization that can solve tough problems and values a collaborative environment.
Every Swiftly employee:
-Has demonstrated the ability to work collaboratively in an ambiguous, fast-paced environment
-Takes ownership of their domain from the ground up, from inception through deployment to customers
-Leaves their ego at the door and ensures the best idea leaves the room
-Is always experimenting with new technologies and learning new skillsets
If you've ever wanted to work on a project that blends a gorgeous consumer experience, sophisticated logistics, and scale that rivals the largest technology players, Swiftly is the place for you.
Equal Opportunity Employer
Swiftly is an Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action Employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, or disability status.
Swiftly will make reasonable accommodations in compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. Reasonable accommodations are available for qualified individuals with disabilities throughout the subsequent application process.
