Engineering Manager - Site Reliability

ABOUT US

Pliant is a modular B2B payments platform that combines commercial card issuing, payment accounts, FX, and spend management in one system — adapting to existing setups rather than requiring customers to replace them.

Businesses across industries such as travel, e-commerce, and insurance use Pliant to manage complex payment workflows with cards, backed by credit lines Pliant underwrites itself.

Fintechs and software platforms embed Pliant's payment infrastructure into their own products, from API-based Cards-as-a-Service to fully white-label solutions. Banks use Pliant's Card & Spend OS, the customer-facing interface, on their own infrastructure to run card programs.

Founded in 2020 and headquartered in Berlin, Pliant serves 5,000+ businesses and 40+ partners across Europe and the United States. A principal member of Visa and Mastercard, Pliant issues commercial cards in 13 currencies across 32 countries — under its own European e-money license and with licensed partners in the UK and US.

Learn more at www.getpliant.com

ABOUT THE ROLE

You're the first hire for a Site Reliability function that doesn't exist yet at Pliant. Today, reliability is a responsibility scattered across many different teams, each with their own priorities: on-call rotation is only just being introduced, there's no framework for SLOs, and nobody's job is reliability instead of firefighting it on the side of something else. You'll standardize the practice at Pliant while hiring the engineers to run it, coaching engineering teams to shift reliability from a burden into an integral part of the software development lifecycle.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Define the framework other teams use to set their own SLOs and error budgets, educating and supporting product teams along the way

• Own blameless post-mortems and root-cause fixes; repeat incidents are treated as a process gap, not a signal about whoever was paged

• Implement production readiness reviews so nothing new ships without one

• Close gaps in Datadog observability coverage, including missing alerts, dashboard blind spots, and noisy pages that erode trust in on-call

• Hire and build the team from the ground up, setting the technical and cultural bar for every engineer who joins after you

WHAT YOU'LL BRING

• 7-10 years of engineering experience, including at least 3 years directly managing engineers

• A track record of hiring and developing engineers, with specific people you've levelled or promoted

• Hands-on production or reliability engineering background. This is not a first management role, and you've carried a pager yourself

• Strong AWS and Terraform experience, comfortable working inside a managed infrastructure-as-code pipeline

• Experience building or running an on-call rotation and incident management process, not just participating in one

• Strong platform observability experience. You know the difference between a good dashboard and a useless one

• Clear communication for a technical, cross-team audience

• A track record of pushing reliability practices upstream into product engineering teams, not just reacting to incidents after the fact

• Proficiency with AI-assisted development (Claude Code, Cursor). Comfortable reviewing AI-written PRs as rigorously as any other

THE FIRST YEAR

• The first few months are about building the on-call rotation and incident process from scratch, since neither exists yet, and hiring the first engineers onto the team

• By mid-year, you have SLOs defined for the services that matter most, a real incident review process, and at least one engineer on the team besides you

• By year one, Site Reliability is a function other teams actually route to, not something they route around, and repeat incidents are trending down because the root-cause fixes stuck

STACK

Terraform, Spacelift, AWS (including a dedicated PCI-scoped account), Datadog. We're subject to PCI DSS, SOC 2, and ISO 27001, and Platform Core's migration toward Kubernetes will increasingly shape what reliability looks like here too.

WHAT WE OFFER

• The opportunity to work in a growing team with big responsibilities that thrives on a strong exchange of knowledge and excellence

• Attractive remuneration

• Your choice of preferred OS, Windows or Mac

• Flat hierarchy and transparent communication in a relaxed, professional atmosphere

• Opportunity to develop your talent in a dynamic team with ambitious goals

• Flexibility and possibility to work remotely

• Pliant Card with monthly credit to explore the product and enjoy food with colleagues

Pliant is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applications from people of all backgrounds, identities and abilities, and are committed to an inclusive hiring process. If you need any accommodations during the interview process, please let us know.

At Pliant we use the Ashby AI Criteria to assist with looking over resumes against our job qualifications for this role. All final decisions are made by our Talent Team and Hiring Team.

A human is behind these processes. Ashby does not automatically reject candidates or make final hiring decisions. Our teams review all results and make the final hiring decision with every candidate that applies.