Job Description

Five9 is rebuilding the operational leadership for its Network & Infrastructure team and needs a hands-on, senior technical manager to take direct ownership of the environment and the team executing the work.

The right candidate will have directly managed production networks at scale, led teams of engineers who build and maintain those systems, and successfully transitioned frontline operations from manual "click-ops" into automated, code-driven execution. If you have not personally managed engineering teams through this specific transition, this is not the right role.

Modernization is already underway, but the current engineering team is short-handed and lacks several critical skills. The person stepping into this role must stabilize daily operations quickly, assess the existing talent, and immediately begin rebuilding both the team and the operating workflows against clear, sprint-level, and measurable milestones.

This is a true player-coach role. You must stay close enough to the technical work to keep your engineering judgment sharp, maintain credibility with senior engineers, and be willing to set the standard by example on the keyboard when needed. At the same time, you must focus on building automated validation gates and upskilling your team so that you can step out of the daily critical path. Carrying a portion of the senior technical load to stabilize the team at the outset is expected; still operating as the primary technical bottle-neck six months in is a failure.

What success looks like in your first 120 days

• A working map of the network and infrastructure estate across our DCs and our cloud footprint, plus a clear assessment of your team's capabilities and operational bottlenecks.

• A team skills assessment and a tactical execution plan that details how your team will transition from manual operations to infrastructure/network-as-code, automation, and drift control, balanced against current project deliverables.

• Key engineering hires onboarded successfully, with existing team members actively engaged in cross-training and upskilling programs.

• Early modernization wins visible in production, the on-call and incident load distributed fairly across the team, and you have successfully transitioned from tactical firefighting to guiding team execution.

What You Bring to Five9

• A track record of building and leading cohesive teams, raising engineering standards, and shifting daily operations from reactive to proactive, engineering-led execution.

• Experience stabilizing operations and guiding engineering teams through periods of technical change and modernization.

• Strong communication skills backed by operational data, clear risk articulation, and the ability to report measurable outcomes to department leadership.

• Proven ability to build trust, accountability, and a high-performance culture within your engineering team.

• Strong cross-functional collaboration skills, with experience partnering closely with software engineering, security, SRE, and product teams.

• Ability to mentor and develop senior engineers and technical leads, driving accountability while establishing clear ownership, operational discipline, and career growth pathways.

• Strong decision-making and prioritization skills in high-pressure production environments with competing operational demands.

• Demonstrated ability to lead teams through ambiguity, align team goals with broader department objectives, and execute complex technical migrations.

• Effective conflict resolution and stakeholder management skills to align technical delivery with business needs.

• Strong operational judgment in network and infrastructure security, with the ability to partner effectively with Security Operations teams.

What We Require

• 7+ years of experience in network/infrastructure engineering, with 3+ years directly managing engineering teams in mission-critical, multi-DC production environments.

• Deep technical background in modern DC networking, including OSPF, EVPN, VXLAN, Cisco Nexus, and NX-OS.

• Experience managing infrastructure in a hybrid cloud environment, with a strong focus on supporting GCP workloads.

• Proven success guiding teams to build and adopt network automation and IaC using tools such as Ansible, Terraform, Python, Git, and CI/CD pipelines.

• Hands-on experience modernizing legacy environments by introducing configuration management, drift detection, and policy-based operations where they didn’t exist before.

• Strong understanding of network and infrastructure observability using tools such as ThousandEyes, Grafana, Loki, NetFlow, and Netscout to achieve a "single pane of glass" for system health.

• Experience supporting the underlying infrastructure needs of Kubernetes, AI, and GPU workloads.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent professional experience).