Engineering Manager, Guard Foundations (Zürich)

Lakera.Ai, a Check Point company, seeks an Engineering Manager for the Guard Foundations team in Zürich. The role leads a 10-engineer team building scalable, high-performance infrastructure for Guard, a developer-first AI security platform, with a focus on observability, performance, and multi-cloud support.

Lakera, a Check Point company, is developing next-generation GenAI security tools that help developers deploy AI safely. The Guard Foundations team creates the core infrastructure enabling Guard’s scalability, speed, and reliability. This role focuses on building the architectural and operational foundation that supports innovation across all Guard teams, especially at the intersection of performance, scale, and machine learning systems.

Responsibilities

• Lead a team of 10 engineers focused on infrastructure, performance, and scalability for the Guard platform.
• Own and maintain core systems powering Guard, including observability, feature toggles, configuration management, rate limiting, authentication, and caching layers.
• Promote engineering excellence by ensuring high performance, clean interfaces, high-quality code, comprehensive testing, and reliable deployments.
• Collaborate with product teams to remove blockers and accelerate innovation by creating reusable infrastructure, tooling, and abstractions.
• Prioritize performance as a product feature by reducing latency, optimizing throughput, and improving system reliability across the Guard stack.
• Mentor and develop engineers with empathy and clarity, while hiring and retaining top talent.
• Contribute to long-term strategic planning by shaping the foundational roadmap for Guard in collaboration with leadership.
• Support multiple deployment models, including on-premise and SaaS environments.
• Define and execute the multi-cloud strategy and framework for the platform.

Requirements

• At least 3 years of experience managing engineering teams, specifically platform-focused groups.
• Strong systems thinking: while daily coding is not required, deep understanding of architecture, performance, and operational resilience is essential.
• Proven success in building infrastructure that scales with product growth and enables faster development cycles.
• Excellent collaboration skills, working effectively with product, design, and engineering teams to unblock and accelerate progress.
• Bias for action and accountability: ability to move quickly, focus on results, and provide clarity in uncertain situations.
• People-first approach: ability to build high-trust, high-performing teams through coaching and support.
• Demonstrated humility, curiosity, and pragmatism, prioritizing impact over personal recognition.