Platform Manager

About Phocas Software

Phocas Software has spent over 20 years developing user-friendly yet powerful financial planning and analytics solutions. With nearly 300 employees worldwide, the Product & Technology team based in Christchurch is pivotal to the company's success. We emphasize rapid innovation, learning from experience, and incorporating AI to enhance productivity.

The backbone of our service is a multi-region AWS SaaS platform that supports mid-sized clients across the US, Canada, UK, Europe, and Australia. This platform integrates established Windows and SQL Server workloads with containerized and serverless services.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and manage the platform team responsible for maintaining availability, performance, security, and cost-efficiency of our AWS infrastructure.
• Promote adoption of AI-driven tools and agentic workflows within the team, ensuring outputs undergo appropriate validation.
• Translate strategic goals into a practical, phased roadmap and drive it to successful, measurable completion.
• Maintain oversight of AWS expenditures, ensuring transparency and efficiency through methods such as cost attribution, rightsizing, and commitment planning.
• Establish robust standards for infrastructure as code, continuous integration/delivery pipelines, monitoring, logging, and access controls, prioritizing simple and maintainable solutions.
• Take an active hands-on role during critical moments such as incident response and root cause analysis, possessing an in-depth understanding of the platform architecture.
• Foster a high-trust team environment and collaborate closely with adjacent teams, including Engineering Enablement.

Required Qualifications and Experience

• Proven experience managing large, complex platforms with several years of leadership in team environments.
• Recent direct engineering involvement in operating high-scale, 24/7 systems.
• Strong foundational knowledge of AWS services including networking, computing, storage, resilience, security practices like IAM, and least-privilege principles.
• Experience managing AWS cost control at scale, including allocation, forecasting, and optimization techniques.
• Hands-on proficiency with infrastructure as code tools such as Terraform and Terragrunt, and operation of CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience managing hybrid environments combining Windows/IIS and self-hosted SQL Server on EC2, alongside container and serverless services like ECS, Lambda, and AWS Batch, with an ability to modernize infrastructure pragmatically.
• Practical use of AI tools integrated into engineering or operational workflows.
• Familiarity with additional technologies such as Atlantis with Terraform/Terragrunt, GitHub Actions, Octopus Deploy, Elastic, and HashiCorp Vault is advantageous.
• A pragmatic approach focused on outcomes and clear, effective communication skills.

Why Join Phocas?

• A supportive team culture valued highly by our employees.
• Opportunity to own a critical platform serving customers across five regions and influence its future direction.
• A forward-thinking environment embracing AI to enhance development and operations.
• Dedicated professional development time allowing one day every two weeks for learning without interruption.
• Convenient, sunny office located in Sydenham with ample parking for various modes of transport.
• Comprehensive benefits including Southern Cross health insurance, life cover, total permanent disability, income protection, extended paid parental leave, and more.
• Flexible working arrangements including hybrid options and adaptable hours.

Additional Information

Phocas is an Accredited Employer that supports international applicants; however, due to visa and processing constraints, only candidates with current New Zealand work rights will be considered.

We are committed to equal employment opportunities regardless of race, color, religion, sex, nationality, orientation, gender identity, disability or veteran status.

Note: Unsolicited resumes from recruitment agencies will not be accepted.

Phocas Software is a prosperous SaaS company with a substantial customer base and a leading product in its category, currently on a growth trajectory from $70M to $250M revenue and restructuring its go-to-market model. This is an excellent opportunity to join the company during a pivotal expansion phase.

We encourage a workplace where employees can pursue what brings them joy, whether that be engaging in innovative sales methods, leading initiatives, environmental activism, or spending quality time with loved ones, supporting well-being and high performance.