Senior Manager, Systems Engineering

About the role

You will lead the transformation of Corporate Engineering from a reactive support organization into a proactive, platform-driven function that the entire company depends on. In this role, you will own the design and execution of critical infrastructure initiatives that underpin how Vanta operates on a daily basis. You will partner closely with security, GRC, finance, and engineering to introduce guardrails that enable speed rather than restrict it. You will manage and mentor a team of systems engineers, elevating their craft while ensuring consistent delivery against ambitious timelines. You will establish the technical direction for identity, access, and device assurance programs, ensuring they scale with the business. You will own the automation and visibility that make platform operations transparent to leadership. Ultimately, you will build a durable systems engineering function that allows Vanta to move faster with confidence.

Key facts

What you'll do

Lead, coach, and grow a team of systems engineers and a tech lead, setting clear expectations and developing engineers who build Vanta's most critical internal systems.

Own joiner, mover, and leaver automation end to end in Okta Workflows, ensuring access is provisioned correctly on day one, adapts through role changes, and fully deprovisions on departure, including API keys and service credentials.

Build and own device assurance across macOS and Windows, defining OS, browser, and device-state policy ahead of enforcement rather than reacting to incidents.

Rationalize the ITSM estate so self-service works efficiently, engineers spend time on platform work instead of tool administration, and partner teams trust the system for requests and incidents.

Make Corporate Engineering a governed step in SaaS procurement, enforcing SSO, conducting access reviews, and preventing tools from going live unnoticed for months.

Own the identity, access, and connector infrastructure behind company-wide AI tooling and the Vercel platform, collaborating closely with AI and Data teams to support rapid experimentation.

Build the visibility layer that shows how work enters the team and where capacity goes, enabling data-driven prioritization and transparent tradeoffs with partners.

Partner with Security, GRC, Finance, and Engineering to enable initiatives rather than gate them, creating guardrails that make self-service safe.

Manage program and project timelines for systems engineering initiatives, coordinating dependencies across teams and communicating progress to stakeholders.

Design and implement runbooks and operational procedures that improve reliability, reduce toil, and support scalable automation.

Evaluate vendor proposals and technical requirements, ensuring proposed solutions align with security standards, compliance requirements, and cost objectives.

Drive incident response for platform outages, leading postmortems and implementing preventative controls to reduce future risk.

Maintain strong relationships with cross-functional stakeholders, gathering requirements, explaining tradeoffs, and influencing decisions that affect infrastructure.

Contribute to hiring and career development within the systems engineering organization, ensuring new and existing team members have clear growth paths.

Requirements

Must be authorized to work in the United States without the need for current or future employer sponsorship.

Have 8+ years of experience in IT or systems engineering, including 3+ years managing and developing engineers, ideally at a company that scaled through a significant headcount inflection.

Demonstrate a track record of raising the bar on an inherited team, holding it through sustained one-on-one coaching, and staying steady when results take more than a quarter to appear.

Show a real appetite for inherited complexity, such as orphaned endpoint programs, unfinished migrations, or over-engineered workflows, and prefer untangling these situations over merely tolerating them.

Exhibit an enablement-first mindset where your default approach is to make something safe to self-serve rather than to control it through restrictive policies.

Possess enough technical depth to evaluate estimates honestly and distinguish between genuine risk and reported progress.

Have hands-on fluency with AI in enterprise tooling, including deploying or governing AI-assisted automation in platforms such as Okta, Intune, Jamf, Atlassian, or GitHub.

Bring experience spanning identity, endpoint management, ITSM, and procurement, or deep expertise in most of these areas with a track record of expanding scope.

Be comfortable operating through influence across security policy, procurement, and AI strategy, even when these areas reside in partner organizations.

Nice to have

None specified.

Practical notes

This role is fully remote within the United States and does not require travel.

Employment is full-time.

Candidates must be authorized to work in the U.S. without employer sponsorship.

There is no specified deadline or visa sponsorship information provided.