Senior Engineering Manager, Delivery

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 3,000 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:

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

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

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

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

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