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Five9 is seeking a Platform Engineering & Infrastructure Manager based in Porto, Portugal to support the operations, reliability, and modernization of its private cloud and platform engineering environment. This role sits at the center of local engineering leadership across compute, storage, virtualization, Kubernetes, and platform services, while helping drive engineering maturity across globally distributed infrastructure teams.
This role is well suited for a technical manager with hands-on experience building and operating modern infrastructure and platform engineering environments. The right candidate brings solid platform engineering depth alongside strong communication, operational leadership, and team coordination skills to maintain stability, improve engineering practices, and support ongoing modernization initiatives.
The environment includes private cloud infrastructure built on OpenStack and Kubernetes, shared platform services, Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD tooling, observability platforms, and AI compute capabilities supporting mission-critical engineering workloads.
This is a hands-on operational leadership role. The right candidate will stay close to production operations, escalations, team execution, and platform reliability while building an engineering culture where accountability and operational discipline are the norm.
What You Will Own
- Operational Leadership: Day-to-day operational leadership for the Portugal-based Platform Engineering & Infrastructure team.
- Cross-Domain Coordination: Coordination and execution across compute, storage, virtualization, Kubernetes, platform services, and private cloud environments.
- Network & Platform Event Management: Direct operational leadership in detecting, triaging, and managing responses to critical network and infrastructure events, ensuring rapid mitigation and minimal business impact.
- Incident & Change Management: Team execution across infrastructure operations, platform reliability, incident response, change management, on-call health, and operational readiness.
- Modernization Workflows: Driving Infrastructure as Code, automation frameworks, CI/CD tooling, observability platforms, and standardized operational workflows with the team.
- Platform Services Ownership: Operational ownership of core platform services including compute and virtualization platforms, storage, Kubernetes, observability tooling, secrets management, CI/CD systems, registries, and identity services.
- Global Coordination: Coordination and partnership across Network Engineering, Security, Production Operations, Cloud Engineering, and global infrastructure teams to align network event handling protocols and post-incident root-cause analyses.
- Team Development: Team mentorship, onboarding, career development, and building engineering capability within the local organization.
- Hands-on Mentorship: The team's progression toward modern platform practices, working alongside engineers day to day to build capability and move operations forward.
- Escalation & Communication: Escalation management, stakeholder communication, and operational coordination during severe incidents, network outages, and production events.
What We Require
- Experience: 7+ years of experience in platform engineering, infrastructure operations, DevOps, or infrastructure environments.
- Leadership: Experience leading technical teams in a platform engineering or infrastructure environment, with a track record of developing engineers and driving team capability forward.
- Private Cloud & Virt: Solid working knowledge of Linux systems, compute, virtualization, storage, and private cloud infrastructure, including hands-on experience with OpenStack or equivalent platforms.
- IaC & CI/CD: Hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code, automation, and CI/CD operational practices using tools such as Terraform, Ansible, Git, Jenkins, GitLab, or similar technologies.
- Containerization: Hands-on experience with Kubernetes platforms such as Rancher, OpenShift, or upstream Kubernetes in production environments.
- Event & Incident Management: Hands-on experience with observability, operational monitoring, network/infrastructure event management, high-severity incident response, and SRE operational practices.
- Platform Delivery: Familiarity with modern platform delivery concepts including CI/CD-driven infrastructure workflows, IaC module management, and platform lifecycle practices.
- 24x7 Operations: Experience working in globally distributed engineering organizations supporting 24x7 production operations and follow-the-sun on-call rotations.
- Stakeholder Management: Strong communication, coordination, and organizational skills with the ability to manage complex escalations and collaborate effectively across technical teams and leadership groups.
- Prioritization: Ability to prioritize operational work, modernization efforts, emergency event responses, and team support responsibilities in fast-paced production environments.
- Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related technical field preferred.
What You Bring to Five9
- Stabilizing Presence: Leadership presence that supports and stabilizes engineering teams during periods of high-stress operational incidents, critical network events, and rapid modernization.
- Collaborative Mindset: A collaborative mindset focused on accountability, clear communication, and getting work done consistently.
- Technical Communication: Strong communication and stakeholder management skills across engineering, network operations, and executive leadership teams.
- Coaching & Mentorship: Ability to mentor engineers, support team growth, and reinforce strong operational and engineering practices.
- Composure Under Pressure: Calm, decisive, and highly effective decision-making during critical network events, severe escalations, and competing operational priorities.
- Proactive Engagement: Stays close to the team, supports engineers directly, and maintains operational continuity day to day.
- Process Discipline: Drives execution while reinforcing sound operational processes, post-incident reviews, and engineering discipline.
- Change Advocacy: Experience leading teams through technical or operational change, with the ability to bring engineers along toward automated workflows and modern ways of working.
What Success Looks Like in Your First 120 Days
- Operational Footing: Operational footing established across incident response, network/infrastructure event handling, and escalation processes for the Portugal-based team, with clear ownership and consistent execution across shifts.
- Global Alignment: Working relationships in place across global Platform Engineering, Network Engineering, Security, and Operations teams, with regular communication cadences and aligned event response playbooks running.
- Skills Assessment: An honest assessment of the team completed, identifying who has the technical depth and appetite to grow toward modern platform practices, automation, and advanced incident handling, and where the development gaps are.
- Hands-on Upskilling: Engineers actively working toward IaC, CI/CD, and modern platform delivery skills as part of their day-to-day work, with a defined development path in place for the team.
- Automation Win: At least one automation or modernization initiative (such as automated event alerting or self-healing workflows) operational in production by day 120, even if early stage, with a clear path for expanding the work.
- Strategic Roadmap: A documented view of where the team's current platform, network observability, and automation practices stand, and a concrete set of proposals for where to focus next.
- Trusted Leadership: Build trust with the local engineering team through strong communication, accountability, operational support, and day-to-day leadership presence.
Benefits:
- Five9 Shares
- Bonus Scheme
- 10% Flexi Benefit
- Meal Allowance
- Medical Insurance
- Life Insurance
- 25 day Annual Leave + Public Holidays
Five9 embraces diversity and is committed to building a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. The more inclusive we are, the better we are. Five9 is an equal opportunity employer.
View our privacy policy, including our privacy notice to California residents here: https://www.five9.com/pt-pt/legal.
Note: Five9 will never request that an applicant send money as a prerequisite for commencing employment with Five9.
