Senior Manager, Software Engineering (L5)

Skills this role screens for

The company

Who we are

At Twilio, we’re shaping the future of communications, all from the comfort of our homes. We deliver innovative solutions to hundreds of thousands of businesses and empower millions of developers worldwide to craft personalized customer experiences.

Our dedication to remote-first work, and strong culture of connection and global inclusion means that no matter your location, you’re part of a vibrant team with diverse experiences making a global impact each day. As we continue to revolutionize how the world interacts, we’re acquiring new skills and experiences that make work feel truly rewarding. Your career at Twilio is in your hands.

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Hiring and how we work

We use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help make our hiring process efficient. That said, every hiring decision is made by real Twilions!

Also, while we are a remote-first company, you may be asked to report in person on an ad-hoc basis for team gatherings, functional off-sites or customer meetings.

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See yourself at Twilio

Join the team as Twilio’s next Senior Engineering Manager.

About the job

As a Senior Engineering Manager in Compliance Experiences, you will lead the Know Your Customer (KYC) engineering team as it builds out Twilio's new Compliance Domain. Your team owns Trust Hub, Twilio's KYC Platform and the gateway to accessing all of Twilio's communication APIs. It serves two distinct customer bases: external customers - Twilio's customers who depend on seamless regulatory compliance to provision and manage phone numbers globally, and internal customers - engineering teams across Twilio who rely on your team's compliance APIs, services, and Ops Tooling to operate efficiently. You will own the people strategy, delivery execution, and stakeholder relationships for a team processing millions of requests daily.

You will be expected to champion AI-driven development practices, ensuring your engineers adopt LLMs and agentic tools to accelerate delivery, improve quality, and stay at the forefront of modern software engineering. Your mission is to build a high-performing team that consistently ships reliable, customer-obsessed products - while balancing the competing demands of external product commitments, internal platform obligations, and operational tooling investments.

The work

Responsibilities

Also

In this role, you’ll

• DRAW THE OWL: Own the delivery roadmap for the Compliance Domain, including customer-facing compliance services, internal platform APIs, and Ops Tooling. Partner with Principal and Staff Engineers to translate long-term technical strategy into executable quarterly plans and measurable outcomes.
• ACCELERATE WITH AI: Drive the adoption of AI coding assistants (GitHub Copilot, Anthropic Claude, or internal LLMs) within your team. Set expectations for AI-augmented workflows, measure the impact on team velocity, and create the psychological safety for engineers to experiment with new tools.
• BE AN OWNER: Take full accountability for your team’s operational excellence, including system reliability, incident response, on-call health, and security posture. Make high-judgment calls that balance speed, quality, and risk.
• WEAR THE CUSTOMER’S SHOES: Serve two customer bases with equal rigor. For external customers, partner with Product Management to ensure compliance workflows are seamless and developer-friendly. For internal customers, proactively engage with dependent engineering teams to understand their needs, gather feedback on your team’s APIs and Ops Tooling, and ensure your platform enables them to move faster. Ground every decision in customer data and feedback from both audiences.
• EMPOWER OTHERS: Recruit, develop, and retain a world-class engineering team. Build a culture of psychological safety, candid feedback, and career growth. Coach your engineers-from mid-level to staff-to reach their full potential and take on increasing ownership. Champion diversity, equity, and inclusion in every hiring and development decision.
• RUTHLESSLY PRIORITIZE: Navigate competing priorities across external product features, internal platform needs, and Ops Tooling investments. Balance requests from multiple stakeholders-Product Management, internal engineering teams, and operations-with a clear framework for saying “no” to protect focus. Ensure resources are aligned to the highest-impact work across all three pillars.
• WRITE IT DOWN: Communicate team strategy, progress, and risks clearly and consistently to engineering leadership and cross-functional partners. Author team plans, post-mortems, and decision documents that create transparency and alignment.
• BUILD BRIDGES: Act as the primary point of contact between the Compliance Domain and its stakeholders. Manage relationships with Product Management, external-facing teams, and internal engineering teams that depend on your compliance services and Ops Tooling. Proactively communicate roadmap plans, surface trade-offs, negotiate priorities, and ensure stakeholders have clear visibility into what your team is delivering and why.
• NO SHENANIGANS: Model integrity in every interaction. Create an environment where engineers feel safe raising concerns, surfacing problems early, and challenging the status quo. Hold yourself and your team to the highest standards of ethical behavior.

Who they want

Qualifications

Twilio values diverse experiences from all kinds of industries, and we encourage everyone who meets the required qualifications to apply. If your career is just starting or hasn't followed a traditional path, don't let that stop you from considering Twilio. We are always looking for people who will bring something new to the table!

Also

*Required

• 15+ years of software engineering experience with at least 5+ years in engineering management, leading a team of 10+ engineers and directly managing individual contributors.
• Technical Depth: Strong hands-on background in designing and operating highly available, cloud-native distributed systems. You don’t need to write code daily, but you must be able to engage deeply in architectural reviews, evaluate technical proposals, and earn the trust of your senior engineers.
• Cloud-Native Fluency: Deep familiarity with AWS ecosystems (Lambda, EKS, DynamoDB, Kafka), microservices patterns, and infrastructure-as-code practices (Kubernetes, Terraform).
• AI-Forward Mindset: Demonstrated experience driving AI tool adoption within your engineering team. You should be able to articulate a clear vision for how AI accelerates your team’s delivery and quality.
• Delivery Excellence: Proven track record of shipping complex software products on time and at high quality. Experience with agile methodologies and a data-driven approach to measuring team health and productivity.
• People Leadership: A track record of building diverse, inclusive, high-performing engineering teams. Experience with career frameworks, performance management, and growing engineers from mid-level to staff-plus.
• Clear Communication: Strong ability to communicate technical strategy, trade-offs, and team plans to engineering leadership, cross-functional partners, and your direct reports.
• Stakeholder Management: Proven ability to manage relationships across multiple stakeholder groups with competing needs. Experience balancing external customer commitments with internal platform obligations and communicating trade-offs transparently.
• Operational Rigor: Experience owning system reliability for mission-critical services, including incident management, on-call rotations, and SLO-driven operational improvements.

Also

Desired

• Platform & Tooling Leadership: Experience leading a team that builds internal platforms or operational tooling serving other engineering teams, with a product mindset toward internal customers.
• Team Scaling: Experience growing and evolving a team through periods of change, including onboarding new engineers, reshaping team processes, and managing through ambiguity.…