Platform Engineering Manager, Shared Services

About Us

SUSE is a global leader of enterprise open source software. By transforming community innovations into secure, sovereign and AI-ready solutions, SUSE empowers customers to escape vendor lock-in and regain control of their IT destiny. Through industry-leading Linux, Kubernetes, Edge and AI infrastructure solutions, SUSE delivers the flexibility to innovate everywhere—from the data center to multi-cloud and out to the edge. Only SUSE also manages many Linux and Kubernetes distributions. At SUSE, Choice Happens because we prioritize community, interoperability and relentless innovation. Discover how we power mission-critical resilience at

SUSE is a global leader of enterprise open source software. By transforming community innovations into secure, sovereign and AI-ready solutions, SUSE empowers customers to escape vendor lock-in and regain control of their IT destiny. Through industry-leading Linux, Kubernetes, Edge and AI infrastructure solutions, SUSE delivers the flexibility to innovate everywhere—from the data center to multi-cloud and out to the edge. Only SUSE also manages many Linux and Kubernetes distributions. At SUSE, Choice Happens because we prioritize community, interoperability and relentless innovation. Discover how we power mission-critical resilience at

Platform Engineering Manager, Shared Services

Job Description

The Shared Services team within SUSE IT Platform Engineering operates the portfolio of tools the company runs on: source control (GitLab, GitHub, Gitea), CI/CD, monitoring (Zabbix, Prometheus, Grafana), Bugzilla, email infrastructure, backup (Bareos), and a long tail of services under active rationalization. The team's mandate is to keep these services reliable, integrate shadow IT into managed SaaS, and reduce undifferentiated operational lift.

We’re hiring a Manager who can set technical direction, unblock a junior-to-mid team, and bring modern operating practices including responsible adoption of AI tooling.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and develop a junior-to-mid engineering team. Provide architectural direction and technical mentorship. The team has strong ops chops but often needs senior judgment on design and prioritization.
• Set technical direction across the portfolio. Decide what to invest in, what to decommission, what to migrate to SaaS, what's "good enough" as-is. Reinforce the team's tenets: focus on value over polish.
• Own the service portfolio as product manager. Prioritize the backlog, manage stakeholder expectations, trade off feature work, ops, and toil reduction.
• Drive operational excellence. SLO-based reliability, MTTR reduction, structured incident response.
• Lead AI adoption for the team. Identify and prioritize practical Agentic AI use cases such as assisted coding, runbook automation, knowledge retrieval, ticket triage, etc. Pilot, measure, scale or sunset.
• Apply FinOps thinking. Measure efficiency, attribute spend, eliminate undifferentiated heavy lifting, favor serverless and managed services where they reduce TCO.
• Integrate shadow IT. Bring unsanctioned tooling under managed services without losing the productivity that drove people there in the first place.
• Collaborate across ITPE team, broader IT organisation and other business units.

Required Qualifications

• A number of years in IT/infrastructure, including 3+ years managing engineering teams. Equivalent demonstrated breadth considered.
• Bachelor's degree in a technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Strong systems architecture; experience with distributed systems, identity, networking, and how services in this portfolio actually work. You'll be the architect for a team that needs technical direction.
• High tolerance for ambiguity. Comfortable making calls without complete information. This portfolio includes services with unclear ownership, fuzzy SLAs, and inherited decisions. You set direction without waiting for perfect clarity.
• Track record of removing roadblocks: technical, organizational, cultural, etc. Escalations and cross-team coordination flow through you, not around you.
• AI literacy. Ability to lead a team through adoption of AI-assisted tooling (GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, ChatGPT Enterprise, or equivalent). Can scope and evaluate GenAI use cases in an IT operations context and understands data governance and security implications. Hands-on experience using these tools yourself is a strong plus.
• Modern operating practices. SLOs, error budgets, DORA metrics, IaC/GitOps, FinOps. Awareness of AIOps capabilities and how to evaluate them.
• Pragmatism. Reinforces team tenets, doesn't over-engineer.

Why Join Us

• Real ownership of a broad portfolio; you set direction across the tooling all of engineering depends on.
• Capable engineers who will grow under good leadership.
• AI adoption, SaaS migration, and decommissioning what doesn't earn its keep.
• 30+ years of open source heritage — shape how SUSE itself operates as an engineering org.

This position is subject to a background check(s), including criminal, credit, and/or employment references. The candidate is required to complete the background check(s) once an offer has been accepted. This will be conducted by SUSE’s external provider, where legally permitted.

As part of our commitment to pay transparency, we are sharing the expected total salary range associated with this role. This range includes the base salary and any applicable target bonus opportunity, subject to the terms of the relevant compensation plans and company policies. Please note that the salary range provided is intended only as a guideline. Individual offers may vary based on objective, non-discriminatory factors, including experience, skills, qualifications, geographic location, internal equity, and budget considerations. In addition to competitive compensation, we are proud to offer an attractive benefits package. Pay Range for Italy: €67,000.00 - €80,000.00

Job

Information Technology

What We Offer

We empower you to be bold, driving your career to create the future you want. We celebrate and reward your achievements.

SUSE is a dynamic environment that is evolving rapidly, thus requiring agility, strong entrepreneurship and an open mind.

This is a compelling opportunity for the right person to join us as we continue to scale and prosper.

We give you the freedom to be yourself. You will work in a global community of unique individuals – like you – with different backgrounds, talents, skills and perspectives. A truly open community where everyone is welcome, has a voice and is encouraged to reach their full potential regardless of age, gender, race, nationality, disability, sexual orientation, religion, or any other characteristics.

SUSE Values

SUSE's culture is centered on four key values - Choice, Community, Trust, and Innovation - which are deeply integrated with our open source ethos. SUSE fosters a diverse and inclusive environment where our people are encouraged to be themselves.

Choice

• We are continuously making choice happen
• We are accountable for our choices
• We never get complacent

Community

• Nobody is smarter than everybody
• We embrace diversity of thought
• We are “open source first, upstream first” where collaboration benefits all

Trust

• We are trusted to deliver with integrity
• We offer trust by default, and do not wait for it to be earned
• We foster an environment where everyone trusts each other

Innovation

• We foster a culture of experimentation, and embrace change by challenging the norm
• We are committed to continuous improvement, creativity and adaptability
• Ideas are great, but without execution they are just ideas