Engineering Manager, Platform

About Radar

Radar is the global leader in geolocation, with geofencing SDKs, maps APIs, and AI-enabled solutions for marketing, fraud, and operations teams.

Why is Radar the best place to work?

• We're trusted by some of the world's best companies, from high-growth startups to the Fortune 500.
• We have incredible scale: We're processing over 1 billion API calls per day from hundreds of millions of devices.
• We're well-resourced, and we've raised $85.5M from world-class investors, including Accel and Insight Partners.
• We have a high-performance culture, with ambitious and entrepreneurial teammates in every role.
• We recently moved into an amazing new office in Flatiron, Manhattan, NYC.
• We were recently named a top 10 best place to work in NYC by Crain's.

Despite our growth and scale, we're still just getting started. That's where you come in.

About the role

We're looking for a hands-on Engineering Manager to lead our Platform Engineering team. At Radar, Platform Engineering is a software and systems engineering team that solves foundational scale challenges - building the core application frameworks, high-throughput distributed systems, and data infrastructure that power our global geolocation engine. Our daily traffic is 1 Billion API calls / day (15,000+ requests / second), so you will be operating at scale in helping our engineers deliver features quickly and at high quality. You will help us build, operate, and secure Radar’s infrastructure, developer platform, and data systems in order to make Radar the most reliable and trusted location platform in the world. This role can either be in our NYC HQ or remote in the US.

The stack

• The API layer is a Node.js + TypeScript app.
• We ship SDKs for iOS, Android, React Native, and more.
• Our main backend service is a geospatial database written in Rust that we call HorizonDB.
• We use MongoDB, S3/Athena, Redis, and Airflow.
• Everything is deployed to AWS via Kubernetes on EKS using Terraform .
• We use Terraform to manage our infrastructure.
• We deploy everything to AWS via EKS.
• We use MongoDB deployed to Atlas.
• We do CI and deployments via CircleCI.
• We monitor production with CloudWatch, Grafana, Pingdom and PagerDuty.
• Most engineers are in the on-call rotation.
• We sponsor OpenStreetMaps, MapLibre and OpenAddresses.

How we use AI

• Engineers choose what AI tools they use, Claude and Codex being the most popular.
• We're actively building Claude skills - for example we've taught it how to debug HorizonDB, our geospatial database.
• All code changes are reviewed by an Engineer knowledgeable in that area. Claude and Codex also review all PRs.
• There is a range of how much engineers use AI. Most use it daily if not weekly.
• We are excited about what AI can do, but we also recognize the risks and don't compromise our coding standards.

How we work

Most of our engineering team are former technical co-founders or former Radar interns from schools like Waterloo and CMU. Most engineers at Radar fit one of two molds, technically: either Staff level expertise in one stack, or Multi-Stack at any level. We say Multi-Stack because "Full-Stack" has the connotation of "Frontend and Backend", but Radar Engineers might also work on Mobile or Data engineering. Not that you need to be an expert in all of those, but a desire to learn, jump around to different stacks and get things done is the important part.

We care a lot about shipping fast and talking to customers. We're committed to our product vision of full-stack location infrastructure, but we also know that customer feedback is a treasure map to gold. Even though Slack is the brain of our company, working together in-person in our NYC HQ is the fastest way for us to get things done. We meet on Mondays to plan out work for the week in small groups and use Linear for planning. All projects are run by an Engineering lead, an executive and a Go-to-Market lead. Engineers figure out what to build, talk to customers, talk to prospects, help close them, get them live and make them successful.

One of the hardest and most valuable practices we have is Walk A Mile - which is shorthand for putting yourself in the user's shoes - but also for literally walking a mile and dogfooding the Radar SDK, because you can't create location infrastructure behind a desk - you have to see how the device behaves in the real world. To us, a week is a long time, and we expect to ship big things every week.

The hiring process

After a call with our Technical Recruiter, you'll do several technical Zoom calls with members of our engineering team: code screen, coding round, and system design round. If those go well we'll invite you to our NYC HQ for a final round interview. You'll meet one of our co-founders, someone from outside engineering, and meet more people from Radar. We'll go into more depth about how we work to see if there is a match.

What you’ll do

• Work on core Radar technology using TypeScript, Rust, Python and Scala.
• Manage, coach, and grow a high-output team of software, systems, and data platform engineers.
• Stay close to the architecture and code. Write tech specs, ship code, and maintain a high technical bar for distributed systems design and code quality.
• Guide the team to build core foundational services such as global rate-limiting, authentication/IAM, distributed caching, shared service middleware, data storage and querying solutions, and more.
• Partner with product engineers to design and scale high-throughput ingestion pipelines and query execution layers handling billions of real-world events.
• Lead initiatives that make Radar engineers dramatically more productive, from shared libraries to deploying horizontal capabilities like DBOS to AI-assisted development tools and testing frameworks.
• Collaborate with our product engineering and SRE teams to build highly available systems with 99.99%+ monthly uptime.
• Foster an engineering culture rooted in ownership, speed, customer empathy, and rigorous technical standards.
• Work closely with executive leadership, product teams, and customer-facing teams to unblock scale-related customer requirements.
• Help integrate security and compliance practices into every stage of the development lifecycle, from design to deployment.
• Have your work power 1 Billion API calls / day.
• Talk to Radar customers and prospects, hear their feedback, incorporate it into your work and make them successful.

You should have

• Prior experience as a Senior, Staff, or Principal Software Engineer building and shipping high-throughput distributed systems or data-intensive applications at scale.
• Have experience managing software engineers (running 1:1s, performance reviews, hiring, career development, and roadmapping).
• A strong systems understanding. You are fluent in distributed system fundamentals, concurrency, latency optimization, data modeling, and API design.
• Comfort reading and reviewing code in languages like Rust, TypeScript, Go, Python, or Java/Scala, and you can challenge technical assumptions during design reviews.
• An interest in talking to customers or prospects and making them successful.

Bonus points if you

• Are a former technical co-founder
• Have experience with high throughput data intensive applications

You’ll work with

• Tim Julien, CTO
• Leo Kim, VP Platform Engineering
• Our Engineering, Customer Success, Sales Engineering and Sales teams
• Our customers and prospects

What we offer

• Competitive salary
• Meaningful stock options in a fast-growing company
• 401(k) plan with 4% match
• New HQ in Flatiron, NYC
• Top-notch equipment
• Catered lunches
• Unlimited PTO
• Health, dental, and vision insurance with 100% coverage for employees
• 12 weeks of paid parental leave
• Commuter and fitness benefits

We’ll share full details of our benefits package at the offer stage. Benefits may vary by location.

Radar is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender, gender identity or expression, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.