Senior Engineering Manager, Edge Delivery

Senior Engineering Manager - Edge Delivery

Fastly is hiring a Senior Engineering Manager to lead our Edge Delivery team. This team owns the customized Varnish engine at the core of Fastly’s global platform. They build and operate the engine, VCL compiler, and edge caching systems that power Fastly worldwide, tackling major platform initiatives like next-generation split storage architectures, VCL language evolution and origin connectivity.

You will work alongside an engineering director who focuses on strategy and executive alignment, leaving you free to manage 15 senior engineers, establish effective team structures, and support steady project execution.

What You'll Do

• Manage a distributed team working on Varnish internals and developing new VCL features.
• Organize the team into sustainable structures to ensure effective and scalable team operations.
• Focus on direct management: run regular 1:1s, provide feedback, support career growth, and help retain top technical talent.
• Partner with product managers and your director to break high-level roadmaps into clear engineering projects, protecting engineers from unnecessary churn.
• Unblock technical issues, refine daily workflows, and maintain high standards for platform uptime and performance.
• Participate in incident response: help triage outages, ask the right technical questions, and support the team under pressure.
• Keep the team focused on core metrics: cache hit ratio, throughput, memory efficiency, and system stability under high load.

What We're Looking For

• 5+ years of experience managing infrastructure or systems engineering teams, including experience leading larger groups (10+ engineers) or setting up tech lead structures.
• 10+ years of related engineering experience in low-latency systems, networking, CDNs, or C/C++/Rust environments, with enough depth to review engineering proposals and prioritize tech debt.
• Enthusiasm for developing senior engineers, building balanced team workflows, and measuring success by team output and health.
• Experience building collaborative, accountable teams with a habit of providing clear, honest, and constructive feedback.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with experience managing distributed teams and turning complex goals into clear tasks.
• A practical approach to problem-solving and a preference for automation over manual work.

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with Varnish or high-throughput HTTP proxy architectures (e.g., Envoy, Nginx, Apache Traffic Server).
• Solid understanding of HTTP caching mechanics and protocols (headers, stale-while-revalidate, conditional requests, object lifecycles).
• Experience with globally distributed edge networks, CDNs, or large-scale traffic management systems.

Work Hours & Travel

• Requires availability during core business hours; occasional nights and weekends as necessary to support on-call coverage.
• Hybrid preference near New York, NY; Denver, CO; or San Francisco, CA offices (open to remote US candidates).
• Travel as required by the role or manager.

Interview Process Notice

The use of AI technologies—including real-time transcription tools, automated scripts, AI copilots, or external assistants—is strictly prohibited during the interview process unless explicitly authorized by the company in advance.