Senior Engineering Manager of Backend Services

Description

Whisker is redefining what it means to live with cats—designing intelligent systems that remove friction, elevate the everyday, and celebrate the quiet brilliance of feline companionship. Today, Litter-Robot leads the category. Tomorrow, an entire ecosystem that expands what’s possible for cats and the people who love them. We believe the future is feline. And we’re imagining that future today.

We work onsite 4+ days a week, with our team based in Auburn Hills, Michigan, and Juneau, Wisconsin. Our team of 700+ passionate pet people thrives on collaboration, innovation, and the occasional office cameo from a four-legged friend.

The Senior Manager, Backend Services leads the teams that own Whisker's digital experience services, robot services, core platform engineering, and IoT data intake — the cloud services that power our mobile and web app experiences and that our devices depend on to function. This leader is accountable for the reliability, scalability, and delivery predictability of those services, along with the AWS infrastructure and platform engineering that support them, while building and developing a distributed team of Whisker engineers and partner contractors.

This role owns four connected domains:

• Digital experience services — the backend services powering the Whisker app experience that customers interact with daily: accounts, device management, scheduling, notifications, and subscription-connected functionality.
• Robot services — the cloud services our devices depend on to operate correctly in customers' homes, including command and control, configuration, state management, and firmware update delivery.
• IoT data intake — ingestion, processing, and routing of device telemetry at scale, and the pipelines that feed product analytics, diagnostics, and machine learning.
• Platform and AWS & GCP infrastructure — the infrastructure, deployment tooling, and observability these services run on, including cost and capacity ownership.

The Senior Manager, Backend Services leads the teams responsible for Whisker’s digital experience services, robot services, IoT data intake, and underlying cloud infrastructure. This leader ensures the reliability, scalability, and delivery predictability of these mission‑critical systems while developing a high‑performing, distributed engineering team.

This list of duties and responsibilities is not all-inclusive and may be expanded to include other duties and responsibilities as deemed necessary.

• Owns the health, roadmap, and technical direction of the digital experience services, robot services, and IoT data intake domains end to end
• Ensures the services' devices depend on and meet the availability and latency requirements of hardware operating in customers' homes, where a service failure is a product failure
• Owns the device-to-cloud contract in partnership with Firmware: telemetry schemas, command and control interfaces, versioning, and backward compatibility across a fleet that cannot all be updated at once
• Owns API design and evolution for the mobile and web clients, balancing client velocity against long‑term service maintainability
• Scales IoT data intake as device volume and telemetry richness grow, managing the cost and performance tradeoffs that come with it
• Leads, coaches, and develops a distributed engineering team of approximately 9–15 across multiple agile pods spanning the service domains above including managing a blended workforce of Whisker full‑time Team Members and partner contractors operating across multiple time zones, holding consistent standards for quality, onboarding, and accountability regardless of employment type
• Owns hiring, leveling, performance management, and career development for the team; partners with Talent Acquisition to strengthen the full‑time core and reduce single-person dependencies
• Sets clear expectations and growth paths using Whisker's engineering competency framework, and identifies and develops Senior, Staff, and Lead‑level talent from within the team
• Establishes team health following a period without direct leadership: restore clarity of ownership, a…