Senior Engineering Manager

See yourself at Twilio

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

About the job

As a Senior Engineering Manager in Communication Identity Domain, you will lead the engineering teams behind Porting, Hosting, and A2P Messaging. Your teams own the products that let customers bring their own numbers onto Twilio (Porting), enable existing numbers for messaging without a full port (Hosting), and register and operate compliant Application-to-Person (A2P) messaging campaigns at scale — the gateway that determines whether a customer's messages actually reach their end users' handsets. Porting and Hosting are high-value, white-glove transactions: each one touches an existing customer's live production number, or a prospective customer's number that already works elsewhere and needs to keep working seamlessly through the transition. That makes operational maturity a core part of the value we deliver — precise execution, clear communication, and dependable outcomes are what earn a customer's trust in the Communication Identity Domain. Delivering on that requires deep, reliable integration with a broad ecosystem of carriers, aggregators, industry registries and the expertise to orchestrate that complexity into a smooth, trustworthy experience for the customer. It also means investing in efficient, well-instrumented Ops Tooling that gives your team and our internal support organizations clear visibility into every port, hosting activation, and campaign — so issues are caught and resolved quickly, and operational excellence scales with the business. You will own the people strategy, delivery execution, and stakeholder relationships for a team responsible for the trust-building work of moving and activating phone numbers for existing and prospective customers.

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.

Responsibilities

In this role, you’ll:

• DRAW THE OWL: Own the delivery roadmap for the Communication Identity Domain, including customer-facing 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 communication identity 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 Communication Identity Domain and its stakeholders. Manage relationships with Product Management, external-facing teams, and internal engineering teams that depend on your 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.

*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.

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.

Location

1. This role will be remote, but is not eligible to be hired in San Francisco, CA, Oakland, CA, San Jose, CA, or the surrounding areas.

Compensation

*Please note this role is open to candidates outside of California, Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Vermont, Washington D.C., and Washington State. The information below is provided for candidates hired in those locations only.

• Based in Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Vermont or Washington D.C. : $207,200.00 - $259,000.00
• Based in New York, New Jersey, Washington State, or California (outside of the San Francisco Bay area): $219,360.00 - $274,200.00.
• Based in the San Francisco Bay area, California: $243,680.00 - $304,600.00.
• This role may be eligible to participate in Twilio’s equity plan and corporate bonus plan. All roles are generally eligible for the following benefits: health care insurance, 401(k) retirement account, paid sick time, paid personal time off, paid parental leave.

Application deadline information

Applications for this role are intended to be accepted until 30th November, but may change based on business needs.