Director of Engineering

The Role

As Director of Engineering – Platform, you will lead and scale the Platform team, providing technical vision, architectural leadership, and operational excellence. You’ll set strategic direction for scalable infrastructure, data pipelines, service reliability, developer productivity tools, CI/CD, and platform abstractions. You will partner closely with Product, Data, Design, and Senior Leadership to align platform initiatives with business goals, ensure high performance, reliability, and scalability, and enable product teams to move fast without reinventing core systems.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and execute platform engineering strategy: scale backend architectures, service reliability, monitoring, performance, automation, and infrastructure.
• Lead and mentor engineering managers, senior engineers; build high-performing teams. Define KPIs and OKRs for availability, latency, cost, deployment frequency, system throughput, error budgets, and technical debt.
• Oversee design, implementation, and operation of automated data pipelines, backend services, APIs, abstractions, reusable internal tools, and microservice frameworks.
• Ownership of system design reviews, architectural decisions, code & design standards, best practices around scalability, reliability, maintainability, security.
• Drive improvements in CI/CD, test automation, deployment automation, and developer tooling (e.g., build/release pipelines, deploy automation, logs/monitoring).
• Ensure strong collaboration across Product, Data, ML/AI, DevOps/SRE, Security teams to align platform support with product roadmaps.
• Manage infrastructure, cloud (AWS or equivalent), databases (RDBMS / NoSQL), storage, message systems, etc. Ensure cost and resource optimization.
• Establish observability, alerting, performance monitoring; own incident response, post-mortems, SLIs/SLOs.
• Recruit, retain, and grow top engineering talent in platform; build culture of ownership, quality, continuous improvement.

What We’re Looking For

Technical & Leadership Skills

• Deep experience designing and operating large scale, distributed backend systems and infrastructure.
• Strong fundamentals: data structures & algorithms; system design; microservices; API and backend service design.
• Proficiency in cloud platforms (AWS), containers/orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes), databases (SQL, RDBMS, NoSQL), automated pipelines, monitoring/observability tools.
• Strong experience with data workflows, data pipelines, processing large data sets (batch/stream), e.g. using Spark, Kafka, etc.
• Demonstrated ability to build or evolve engineering platforms: tools, abstractions, frameworks that accelerate product delivery.

Soft Skills & Mindset

• Proven leadership: ability to lead managers and senior engineers, deliver large-scale strategic technical projects.
• Excellent communication skills: able to articulate technical strategy to executives, product stakeholders, engineering teams; able to negotiate trade-offs (scalability vs speed vs cost).
• Strong decision-making and prioritization skills in ambiguous / fast-paced environments.
• Passion for quality, reliability, automation, and strong engineering culture.