Senior Engineering Manager, Delivery
Senior Engineering Manager, Delivery
- R-7439
- Engineering Department
About Upstart
At Upstart, we’re united by a mission that matters: to radically reduce the cost and complexity of borrowing for all Americans. Every day, we bring creativity, experimentation, and advanced AI to reshape access to credit, helping millions move forward financially with clarity and confidence.
As the leading AI lending marketplace, we partner with banks and credit unions to expand access to affordable credit through technology that’s both radically intelligent and deeply human. Our platform runs over one million predictions per borrower using more than 1,800 signals, powering smarter, fairer decisions for millions of customers. But the numbers only hint at the impact. Every idea, every voice, and every contribution moves us closer to a world where credit never stands between people and their financial progress.
We’re proudly digital-first, giving most Upstarters the flexibility to do their best work from wherever they thrive, alongside teammates across 80+ cities in the US and Canada. Digital-first doesn’t mean distant. We’re intentional about in-person connection through team onsites, planning sessions, and moments that spark creativity and trust. And whether you choose to work primarily from home or collaborate in-person from one of our offices in Columbus, Austin, the Bay Area, or New York City (opening Summer 2026), you’ll have the support to work in the way that works best for you.
If you’re energized by tackling meaningful problems, excited to innovate with purpose, and motivated by work that truly matters, we’d love to hear from you.
The Team:
The Delivery team enables engineers at Upstart to ship software to production safely, quickly, and predictably. The team owns the systems and workflows that take deployable software artifacts through release and into production, including deployment infrastructure, progressive delivery capabilities, and the modernization of delivery workflows for Upstart’s monolith and distributed services.
Our goal is to make production deployment routine, self-service, and driven by trusted system signals rather than manual coordination or approval. We are building a model where engineers can release changes confidently, understand deployment health in real time, and recover quickly when production signals indicate a problem.
The team partners closely with Developer Platform, Cloud Platform, SRE, Security, and product engineering. Developer Platform owns how software is built and validated, while Delivery owns how that software is released and promoted into production. This boundary aligns the posting to the new organizational model, where CI/CD build responsibilities move out of Delivery and deployment remains within the Delivery charter.
The Role:
As the Senior Engineering Manager of the Delivery team, you will lead a team responsible for improving how software is deployed and released across Upstart. You will own the strategy and execution for deployment infrastructure, progressive delivery, production promotion, rollback, and the delivery capabilities supporting both modern services and Upstart’s monolith.
Your focus will be making production releases safer, faster, and more predictable. You will reduce manual intervention, standardize deployment patterns, improve release visibility, and build automated safeguards that allow engineering teams to deploy independently without sacrificing customer or system safety.
This role is suited for a technically strong, execution-oriented leader who understands deployment systems, production operations, and large-scale platform transitions. You will balance the immediate needs of critical release infrastructure with longer-term modernization that makes deployment a low-friction and dependable part of engineering at Upstart.
How you’ll make an impact:
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Team Leadership and Execution
- Manage and develop a team focused on deployment infrastructure, release automation, monolith delivery, and engineering velocity
- Define a clear charter, roadmap, ownership model, and measurable outcomes for the Delivery function
- Translate strategy into capacity-aware plans with explicit priorities, trade-offs, milestones, and success measures
- Maintain strong operational ownership of critical systems used to release software into production
- Build a culture of execution, technical quality, ownership, and continuous improvement
- Develop engineers and technical leaders who can independently own complex delivery capabilities
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Delivery Platform Evolution
- Improve the speed, reliability, safety, and usability of deployment workflows
- Standardize deployment and release patterns across services and engineering teams
- Advance progressive delivery, automated rollback, and signal-driven production promotion
- Reduce manual gates, deployment-specific tribal knowledge, and cross-team coordination
- Improve deployment observability so engineers can quickly understand release status, health, and customer impact
- Ensure deployment infrastructure is secure, auditable, resilient, and scalable
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Monolith Delivery and Modernization
- Improve the safety and efficiency of building, releasing, and operating changes within Upstart’s monolith
- Reduce bottlenecks and operational risk in shared release workflows
- Establish incremental modernization plans that improve delivery without destabilizing critical systems
- Partner with application and platform teams to clarify ownership and reduce coupling in the release process
- Support architectural transitions while maintaining a predictable production delivery experience
- Ensure changes to legacy delivery systems produce measurable improvements in engineering velocity and release safety
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Self-Service Release Operations
- Enable engineering teams to deploy, promote, monitor, and roll back releases through standardized self-service workflows
- Provide clear interfaces between Developer Platform build outputs and Delivery-owned deployment systems
- Reduce support requests and manual intervention through automation, documentation, and improved platform usability
- Partner with engineering teams to identify release pain points and prioritize high-leverage improvements
- Establish clear deployment standards while supporting justified differences between service architectures
- Improve adoption of preferred deployment patterns across the engineering organization
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Delivery Reliability and Operational Excellence
- Establish service expectations and operational practices for critical deployment systems
- Improve detection, diagnosis, and recovery for release infrastructure failures
- Reduce recurring deployment toil, instability, and failed-release patterns
- Partner with SRE to embed appropriate reliability signals and safeguards into production release workflows
- Use deployment data to identify systemic friction, prioritize investment, and communicate impact
- Maintain visible ownership of delivery health, risk, capacity, and technical debt
What we’re looking for:
Minimum Qualifications:
- 5+ years of engineering management experience
- 7+ years of experience in software engineering, DevOps, release engineering, platform engineering, or a related discipline
- Significant technical experience with deployment systems, release automation, progressive delivery, or production infrastructure
- Experience managing critical internal platforms used to release software across a large engineering organization
- Strong understanding of distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, production operations, and software-release risk
- Demonstrated ability to translate strategy into focused, capacity-aware execution plans and measurable outcomes
- Experience leading modernization while maintaining stability of business-critical legacy systems
- Track record of hiring, developing, and retaining high-performing engineers and technical leaders
- Strong cross-functional leadership and communication
- Systems thinking across release safety, engineering velocity, scalability, and operational resilience
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with deployment technologies such as Argo CD, Spinnaker, Kubernetes controllers, or similar systems
- Experience implementing progressive delivery, canary releases, automated rollback, or signal-driven promotion
- Experience operating deployment systems for both monolithic and microservice architectures
- Familiarity with Kubernetes, AWS, service mesh technologies, and modern cloud-native platforms
- Experience modernizing large-scale release or deployment infrastructure
- Experience supporting major platform or architectural transitions
- Experience defining and measuring deployment performance through metrics such as lead time, deployment frequency, and change failure rate
- Strong product mindset when building internal delivery capabilities
- Experience partnering with CI or Developer Platform organizations across a clearly defined build-to-deploy boundary
Position location This role is available in the following locations: Remote - US, Remote - Canada
Time zone requirements The team operates on the East/West coast time zones.
Travel requirements As a digital first company, the majority of your work can be accomplished remotely. The majority of our employees can live and work anywhere in the U.S but are encouraged to to still spend high quality time in-person collaborating via regular onsites. The in-person sessions’ cadence varies depending on the team and role; most teams meet once or twice per quarter for 2-4 consecutive days at a time.
#LI-REMOTE
#LI-MidSenior
At Upstart, your base pay is one part of your total compensation package. The anticipated base salary for this position is expected to be within the below range. Your actual base pay will depend on your geographic location–with our “digital first” philosophy, Upstart uses compensation regions that vary depending on location. Individual pay is also determined by job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process.
In addition, Upstart provides employees with target bonuses, equity compensation, and generous benefits packages (including medical, dental, vision, and 401k).
At Upstart, your base pay is one part of your total compensation package. The anticipated base salary for this position is expected to be within the below range. Your actual base pay will depend on your geographic location–with our “digital first” philosophy, Upstart uses compensation regions that vary depending on location. Individual pay is also determined by job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process.
In addition, Upstart provides employees with target bonuses, equity compensation, and generous benefits packages (including medical, dental, vision, and 401k).
What you'll love
At Upstart, our benefits are designed to support your health, financial well-being, family, and personal growth. Here’s what you can expect:
- Competitive compensation, including base pay, bonus opportunities, and annual equity grants that vest quarterly
- Retirement benefits to help you plan for the future, including a 401(k) or Group Retirement Savings Plan with a company match of $2 for every $1 contributed, up to $15,000 annually (USD in the US, CAD in Canada)
- Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP) with discounted stock purchase options for eligible employees (US only)
- Comprehensive health coverage designed to support you and your family, including medical, dental, vision, and wellness resources for US and supplemental health coverage for Canada.
- Health Savings Account contributions from Upstart for eligible plans (US only)
- Income protection benefits, including life insurance and disability coverage for added financial security
- Paid time off, sick leave, and company holidays, in line with local requirements
- Paid family and parental leave to support caregiving and major life moments (duration varies by country)
- Family-centered benefits to support fertility, parenthood, and caregiving needs
- Employee Assistance Program (EAP) offering mental health support and life-centered resources
- Financial wellness resources, including access to financial planning tools and a financial concierge service (US Only)
- Annual wellness allowance to support your physical and emotional well-being and personal development, based on what matters most to you
- Annual productivity allowance to invest in relevant tools and resources you need to do your best work, no matter where you work from
- Connection and community through team events, all-company updates, and employee resource groups (ERGs)
- Onsite perks, including catered lunches and fully stocked micro-kitchens when working from one of our offices in the Bay Area, Austin, Columbus, and New York City (opening Summer 2026!)
For roles based in Canada, please note that we are not currently able to hire in Quebec.
Upstart is a proud Equal Opportunity Employer. Just as we are dedicated to improving access to affordable credit for all, we are committed to inclusive and fair hiring practices.
If you require reasonable accommodation in completing an application, interviewing, completing any pre-employment testing, or otherwise participating in the employee selection process, please email candidate_accommodations@upstart.com
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