Senior Manager, Platform Engineering

Opportunity

Senior Manager, Platform Engineering leads the function responsible for Chipotle’s core infrastructure platforms and reports to the Director of IT Infrastructure. In this role, you are responsible for building and driving the strategic roadmap, cross‑team dependencies, and alignment with enterprise strategy. You oversee the design, implementation, and operation of a secure and scalable technology platform that supports our restaurants and enterprise systems.

You are accountable for platform reliability, scalability, and optimization across your scope. You will translate strategic objectives (such as resiliency, reliability, automation and cost optimization) into team projects and priorities, ensuring our platform services (Azure cloud, on‑prem servers, containers, etc.) are robust and future‑ready. This senior manager balances daily operational excellence with forward‑looking improvements, guiding the Platform Engineering function to deliver on Chipotle’s modernization and growth initiatives through innovation and best practices.

This position will be based in our Columbus, OH office 4 days per week (with work from home on Friday). Remote work is not available for this role.

• Manage the Platform Engineering function, setting clear goals and work plans for initiatives like cloud infrastructure builds, environment automation, and performance tuning.
• Directly manage the team of engineers and prioritize the team’s efforts to align with Chipotle’s infrastructure roadmap and ensure on‑time, quality delivery of projects.
• Make strategic decisions on platform architecture, technology direction, and multi‑year roadmap, while making tactical decisions on teamwork prioritization, sprint planning, and technical trade‑offs.
• Co‑represent Infrastructure as part of the enterprise architecture review board and other decision forums, influencing strategy and cross‑departmental initiatives.
• Solve enterprise‑scale, multi‑domain problems involving platform strategy, cross‑IT dependencies, business impact trade‑offs, and long‑term technology evolution.
• Ensure the reliability and scalability of Chipotle’s core platforms: oversee proactive maintenance (patch management, backups, capacity planning), implementation of high‑availability and disaster recovery strategies, and rapid restoration of service when incidents occur.
• Set and track KPIs for platform uptime, system performance, and cloud costs, taking corrective action as needed to meet targets.
• Be accountable for overall Platform Engineering function outcomes: platform reliability and uptime, defining SLAs, cloud cost management and optimization, platform security posture and compliance, delivery of strategic roadmap initiatives, team capability and talent development, and alignment with Infrastructure and business objectives.
• Identify, assess, and mitigate platform‑related risks; maintain a risk register and escalates appropriately.
• Establish and enforce platform governance frameworks in alignment with Chipotle’s overall governance strategies and policies.
• Provide technical leadership for Platform Engineering: set direction, conduct design reviews for critical initiatives, and serve as an escalation point for complex technical issues.
• Work closely with Lead Engineers to translate the technical vision into execution, maintaining deep technical credibility while balancing leadership responsibilities.
• Champion function‑level innovation and transformation: platform modernization roadmap and emerging technology adoption.
• Drive team‑level continuous improvement by working directly with Lead Engineers on automation, technical debt reduction and process optimization.
• Manage vendor relationships and contract negotiations for platform technologies.
• Provide regular executive reporting on platform health, project status, and strategic initiative progress.

• Bachelor’s Degree (BA/BS) in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related technical discipline preferred;
  Master’s Degree in a relevant field (e.g. Information Technology Management) or advanced certifications in cloud/infrastructure (AWS/Azure, etc.) preferred.
• 10+…