Sr. Technical Product & Program Manager, Platform Engineering
Betterment · New York, United States · 1mo ago
About Betterment
Betterment is a leading, technology-driven financial services company that offers investing, savings and retirement solutions for retail investors and investment advisors as well as financial wellness solutions, including a 401(k) for small and medium-sized businesses. Our team is passionate about our mission, to empower people to build wealth with confidence and ease. We’re headquartered in NYC and offer hybrid NY-based positions (four days/ week in-office, with no required office days during the summer and winter holidays).
About the role
Platform Engineering organization’s mission is to enable engineers across the company to ship good code quickly, sustainably, and enjoyably. As a Senior Technical Program & Product Manager within Platform Engineering, you will partner with team leaders to understand organizational needs, align on priorities, and help craft and manage roadmaps for the platform capabilities that support Betterment’s engineering organization.
Working with Platform Engineering leaders, you will help define and prioritize initiatives that enable the company to:
- Power Product Innovation: Partner with product engineering teams to develop scalable platform services, tooling, and shared components that help teams ship new features faster and more safely.
- Standardize & Simplify: Collaborate on standards, frameworks, best practices, and migration paths that reduce fragmentation and make it easier for teams to build and operate services.
- Maximize Efficiency: Identify opportunities with platform teams to improve reliability and operational excellence through automation, workflow simplification, and performance optimization.
- Minimize Risk: Help align platform investments with the security, stability, resilience, compliance, observability, and disaster-readiness needs of the organization.
You will lead highly technical, cross-team initiatives end to end: framing the problem, aligning stakeholders, driving execution, surfacing risks, and measuring outcomes. You will work closely with the leaders of SRE Infra Enablement, Developer Experience, Security, and API & Auth Platform, as well as product engineering and other partners who depend on these capabilities.
You thrive in the intersection of product thinking and technical program delivery. You’re equally comfortable white-boarding with engineers, presenting tradeoffs to executives, and collaborating with cross-functional teams to drive meaningful, durable outcomes.
This role is based out of our NYC office. Below we've reflected the base salary range for this position. Actual salaries may vary depending on factors including but not limited to location, experience, and performance. The range listed is just one component of Betterment’s total compensation package for employees.
- New York City: $125,000-$145,000
This job may also be eligible for variable compensation in the form of a company incentive bonus.
A Day in the Life:
- Partner with SRE Infra Enablement, Developer Experience, Security, and API & Auth Platform leaders to understand their strategies, constraints, dependencies, and investment choices.
- Help facilitate a recurring roadmap process that turns technical opportunities, operational pain points, and partner needs into clear priorities and sequenced investments.
- Work with engineering leaders and senior technical staff to clarify the problem, define the desired outcome, evaluate options, and document the decisions and tradeoffs.
- Track progress against roadmap commitments and platform outcomes, surfacing risks, dependencies, and decisions early rather than simply reporting status.
- Help teams make explicit tradeoffs when capacity is limited: what we will do, what we will defer, what we will stop doing, and what support or adoption is required from partner teams.
- Partner with product engineering teams to understand adoption barriers and ensure that platform capabilities are usable, well-documented, and supported in practice.
- Define and track measures of success such as reliability, security posture, developer experience, adoption, delivery efficiency, operational burden, and service performance.
- Coordinate cross-team execution for initiatives that span multiple platform areas, including migrations, standards, shared services, and changes to engineering workflows.
- Prepare concise updates and decision documents for platform leadership, with a clear point of view and explicit asks when leadership input is required.
What We’re Looking For:
- Strong experience shaping and executing roadmaps for backend platforms, infrastructure, developer tooling, SRE, security, APIs, authentication, or related technical domains.
- Experience leading complex, cross-team programs where success depended on influence, adoption, and sustained partnership rather than direct authority.
- Technical depth sufficient to work effectively with senior engineers on backend architecture, operational tradeoffs, reliability, security, developer workflows, or platform APIs.
- A demonstrated ability to turn ambiguous technical problems into clear decisions, priorities, milestones, and measurable outcomes.
- Experience balancing near-term delivery with long-term platform health, including standards, migrations, deprecations, reliability improvements, and operational readiness.
- Strong judgment about how to prioritize shared platform investments when different teams have legitimate but competing needs.
- Exceptional written and verbal communication, including the ability to explain technical tradeoffs clearly to both engineers and senior leaders.
- A collaborative, low-ego working style and a willingness to go deep enough to understand the problem without taking ownership away from the engineering leaders and teams doing the work.
- Data-informed decision making, with the ability to define and use metrics related to reliability, security, adoption, developer experience, and efficiency.
Join a team built on these core values
We change lives
Be a part of a community of innovators working to transform financial outcomes for real people. Your work will make an impact, always laddering up to our mission; to empower people to build wealth with confidence and ease.
We set audacious goals
We set them for the company, our customers, and ourselves, and we won’t stop until we reach them. We don’t just show up; we give our all, then celebrate our wins.
We value all perspectives
When we collaborate, we're at our best. We believe diverse perspectives lead to better outcomes and strive to uphold our supportive and inclusive community.
We simplify financial services
We’re financial services pioneers, always finding new ways to improve, optimize, and enhance. Constant improvement is in our DNA.
Our Commitment to Your Total Well-being:
- We offer a competitive suite of benefits, including medical, dental, and vision coverage; life and AD&D insurance; short- and long-term disability; infertility support and WPATH-aligned transgender health benefits; an Employee Assistance Program (EAP); transit benefits and FSA and HSA options
- Ownership: Equity for all employees, including new hire and refresher grants.
- Time: Flexible paid time off, paid parental leave, and a fully paid four-week sabbatical in your sixth year.
- Growth: Company-paid professional coaching for all employees.
- Wealth: Day-one 401(k) match plus matching on qualified student loan payments.
What happens next
We’ll take a few weeks to review all applications. If we’d like to spend more time with you, we’ll reach out to arrange next steps, which will include 3-4 sets of meetings with your future colleagues.
In the interview process, we’ll look to learn more about your skills, experiences, capabilities, and motivators. Many of our questions will be aimed at understanding how you might operate here at Betterment. Depending on the role, we may ask you to complete a case study exercise or technical assessments, as we want to collect a robust set of data points to better inform our decisions.
On average, it takes us around 3-5 weeks to make a hiring decision, depending on your availability and sense of urgency. As a best practice, we aim to interview at least 2-3 final round candidates before making a hiring decision. Please note that, as we usually receive an overwhelming number of applications for open positions, we’re unable to offer individual feedback during the interview process.
We recognize that interviewing for a new role is a big deal. We appreciate you considering Betterment as the next step in your career, and our Recruiting Team is here to support and advocate for you through the interview process!
Betterment is dedicated to providing accommodations to candidates upon request. If you need accommodations at any point throughout the interview process, please reach out to your recruiter.
Please note that in any materials you submit, you may redact or remove age-identifying information such as age, date of birth, or dates of school attendance or graduation. You will not be penalized for redacting or removing this information.
Come join us!
We’re an equal opportunity employer and comply with all applicable federal, state, and local fair employment practices laws. We strictly prohibit and do not tolerate discrimination against employees, applicants, or any other covered persons because of race, color, religion, creed, national origin or ancestry, ethnicity, sex, gender (including gender nonconformity and status as a transgender or transsexual individual), sexual orientation, marital status, age, physical or mental disability, citizenship, past, current or prospective service in the uniformed services, predisposing genetic characteristic, domestic violence victim status, arrest records, or any other characteristic protected under applicable federal, state or local law.