Title: Director of Platform Engineering

Department: Technology

Reports To: VP of Platform Engineering

FLSA Status: Exempt

Location: Chicago Metro Area, IL, Denver Metro Area, CO, or New York Metro Area, NY (Hybrid)

About the role

We're seeking a Director of Platform Engineering to lead our talented teams. Reporting to the VP of Platform Engineering and with several engineering managers reporting to you, in this role you'll be the driving force behind the design, implementation, and maintenance of our cloud infrastructure and services. You'll collaborate closely with senior business and engineering leaders to ensure our cloud operations align seamlessly with business objectives, delivering scalable and reliable solutions that empower our growth.

Our Platform Engineering journey

Two years ago, we embarked on a journey to elevate our platform engineering capabilities by consolidating our SRE and Cloud Engineering teams as well as our datacenter Production Operations team into a unified Platform Engineering organisation. Since then, we've focused on streamlining, standardising and simplifying our technology stack and deployment models and now, we're ready to take the next leap towards Platform Engineering maturity.

Key focus areas

• Internal Developer Platform: Build internal platform services to empower developers to self-service their infrastructure and platform needs.
• Reliability: Lead the team to achieve an internal SLO of 99.999% - yes, that's five nines!
• Incident Management and Response: Establish clear and efficient processes, train Incident Commanders and responders and roll-out the process across the company.
• Observability 2.0: Implement a company-wide standard based on OpenTelemetry

About you

• Technical Leadership: You performed engineering roles at a senior level earlier in your career and you understand the challenges of designing, building and running efficient and scalable applications in production. As such, you're capable of providing technical guidance and mentorship and helping the team make technical decisions.
• People-Centric Management: At some point in your career you went onto the management path, you found it fascinating and now you are really passionate about fostering growth and success in others. This is the key requirement about this role: Your primary mission is to develop your people. You have a proven track record of leading and managing technical teams, including other managers.
• Process-Driven: At this point in our journey the team needs clarity and repeatability of operations. You excel at creating, writing and implementing repeatable processes, ensuring clarity and efficiency across the team and stakeholders. For this role we need someone who actually enjoys writing down processes and seeing them through implementation, with great attention to detail.
• Visionary: You have a clear vision for the future of Platform Engineering, grounded in a deep understanding of SRE, production engineering, cloud native architectures and modern observability practices.

Responsibilities

• Leadership & Strategy
• Lead, inspire, and mentor Platform Engineering managers, fostering a culture of innovation and continuous improvement.
• Set clear goals, hire and develop top talent, and cultivate a high-performing team.
• Define and execute the platform engineering strategy, aligning it with business objectives.
• Champion Platform Engineering best practices, driving automation and DevOps principles.
• Platform Development & Operations
• Oversee the design, development, and operation of the platform, ensuring it meets the needs of customers and internal teams.
• Evolve the platform architecture to ensure scalability, resilience, and adaptability.
• Implement robust monitoring and alerting systems for proactive issue identification.
• Establish and maintain service level objectives (SLOs).
• Collaboration & Communication
• Partner with product, engineering, and other stakeholders to understand and translate their needs into platform capabilities and platform interfaces.
• Collaborate with security and compliance teams to ensure adherence to standards.
• Communicate effectively with technical and non-technical audiences, showcasing the platform's value.
• Innovation & Continuous Improvement
• Stay at the forefront of emerging technologies in platform engineering and cloud computing.
• Evaluate and integrate new technologies that enhance platform capabilities.
• Foster a culture of experimentation and learning.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience
• 5+ years of senior-level experience as a Software Engineer, SRE, Platform Engineer, or similar role
• 5+ years of experience leading and managing technical teams, some experience managing other managers
• Experience running SaaS products in cloud environments (AWS preferred)
• Experience with Kubernetes, Terraform, GitOps configuration management (ArgoCD and Argo rollouts), modern CICD pipelines etc
• Programming skills (Go, Java, or similar) for code review and guidance
• Distributed systems design skills and understanding of architecture patterns
• Deep understanding of observability practices and tools, including OpenTelemetry
• Experience with database technologies (MySQL, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, MongoDB) as well as Kafka, Redis, Airflow, Apache Flink, etc
• Strong understanding of cloud architecture and best practices in security, performance, reliability, cost efficiency etc
• Excellent communication and leadership skills
• Experience with agile development methodologies

This position description should not be considered the final description of the position. The position description is not intended to be an all-inclusive list of duties and standards of the positions. It should be assumed that we would, to some extent, structure responsibilities in accordance with the successful candidate’s capabilities and changing business conditions. Incumbents will follow any other instructions, and perform any other related duties, as assigned by their supervisor.

The anticipated salary range for this role is $200,000 - $230,000, company bonus and stock options. Offered salary will be determined by the applicant’s education, experience, knowledge, skills, geo-location, and abilities, as well as internal equity and alignment with market data.