Director, Platform Engineering

Manager Notes Even though the primary role of this person will be tmanage a team of engineers and managers, they need thave a strong technical background in SRE, Observability, Infrastructure, Kubernetes, Kafka, etc.

Job description:

This is a people-management role with full supervisory responsibility for a team of engineers and managers. The Director will lead and manage this team tdrive reliability, observability, and cloud platform engineering excellence across a large, complex cloud-based computing environment. The ideal candidate is a hands-on, data-driven technical leader, whcan personally raise the bar on SRE and observability practices, reduce waste, optimize cloud efficiency, and improve performance, in close partnership with a dedicated SRE/monitoring team and a centralized architecture function. This individual will alsserve as a player-coach, passionate about new technologies, mentoring technical teams through complex initiatives while keeping a steady eye on the extensive regulatory/compliance demands on our company (e.g., CIS, NIST).

Primary Duties and Responsibilities:

To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able tperform each primary duty satisfactorily.

Reports tthe Executive Director of Platform Engineering

Management Responsibilities:

Manage and develop a team of engineers and managers focused on SRE, observability, and cloud platform engineering, growing and retaining talent

Lead hiring and staffing for the team, including sourcing, interviewing, and selecting engineers and managers tbuild out the organization

Meet with team members regularly tprovide coaching and feedback on performance

Perform evaluations and deal effectively with staff problems and corrective actions as needed

Develop employee career development plans tassist with team member career growth and development

Manage and participate in the implementation of production changes during defined maintenance windows and support on-call rotation

Serve as a point of escalation within the team for reliability, observability, and platform support issues

Foster an atmosphere of trust, respect, and high performance while displaying strong ethics and integrity

Manage project and daily work task planning and prioritization, meeting project deadlines while maintaining a high quality of work

Ensure team compliance with all appropriate OCC policies and procedures, and institute corrective actions taddress audit and other regulatory or compliance findings

Operate within budget; establish and assure adherence tschedules, work plans, and performance requirements

Technical & Platform Responsibilities:

Bring deep, hands-on SRE and observability expertise tPlatform Engineering, elevating the maturity, rigor, and technical depth of the organization s observability, monitoring, and reliability practices in close partnership with the dedicated SRE and monitoring team

Serve as a technical authority on reliability engineering, mentoring engineers and managers and raising the bar on SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, incident response, and postmortem discipline across the platform organization

Own the definition, governance, and lifecycle of SLOs and SLAs across Platform Engineering, codified as SLO-as-code (e.g., OpenSLO, Sloth, or Nobl9) and version-controlled in the reprather than only living in a vendor UI

Drive resilience engineering as a discipline across the platform, including chaos engineering (e.g., AWS FIS, Gremlin) and load/performance testing, tproactively validate and improve system resilience ahead of production incidents

Deliver golden paths and templates (Terraform modules, Helm charts, pipeline templates) that ship with logging, metrics, tracing, dashboards, alerts, and SLdefaults out of the box, reducing toil and accelerating safe onboarding for engineering teams

Act as product owner for observability within the platform organization, defining the roadmap and requirements for observability capabilities while the dedicated SRE and monitoring team retains ownership of the underlying tooling and operations

Own and drive platform engineering delivery and reliability metrics, including DORA metrics (deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, MTTR), cycle time, and throughput, holding the organization accountable tcontinuous improvement

Define and report on a rounded set of platform and observability metrics: platform adoption (percentage of services on paved roads, service catalog completeness, time tfirst deploy, onboarding time), observability coverage (percentage of tier-1 services with SLOs, instrumented traces, and runbooks), observability health (MTTD, MTTA, alert actionability ratio, toil percentage, and paging load per engineer), observability economics (telemetry cost per service, cardinality and ingestion growth, and retention tiers), and developer experience (SPACE/DevEx measures alongside DORA)

Champion the Golden Signals, RED, and USE methods as the platform s common language for monitoring and alerting

Ensure audit-grade telemetry practices, including log retention and immutability, PII and sensitive-data scrubbing, and access controls on observability data, mapped trelevant compliance frameworks (e.g., CIS, NIST, and SIFMU-specific resilience and reporting expectations)

Drive reliability across four core pillars: a data-driven culture ( data junkies ) that uses telemetry and metrics, not intuition, tmake decisions; waste reduction through elimination of toil and inefficient processes; cloud measures such as utilization, rightsizing, and FinOps metrics; and continuous performance optimization

Translate reliability signals (SLOs, error budgets, incident learnings) surfaced by the SRE organization intconcrete cloud platform investments and roadmap priorities

Drive results in the cloud platform by building a reliable, scalable, secure technology stack in collaboration with engineers and leaders, using leading industry practices

Champion infrastructure-as-code (IaC) practices across the cloud platform, ensuring provisioning, configuration, and environment management are automated, version-controlled, and consistently applied

Assess and plan for capacity needs within the cloud platform and forecast accordingly

Collaborate with the centralized architecture function on platform architecture decisions, ensuring cloud platform engineering execution aligns with broader architectural standards and direction

Implement and manage initiatives within your assigned area of responsibility with accountability for results and compliance with all controls and security requirements

Lead in the development of technology roadmaps and end-of-life technology plans

Effectively communicate project and operational service issues tsenior management promptly with observations, decisions, and recommendations for corrective measures

Other duties as assigned

Supervisory Responsibilities:

Manage a team of engineers and engineering managers focused on SRE, observability, and cloud platform engineering. Full people-management responsibilities, including hiring, performance management, coaching, career development, and corrective action.

Qualifications:

[Required] 5+ years of demonstrated experience leading engineering teams, with an emphasis on developing key talent and cultivating positive, high-performing cultures

[Required] 10+ years of progressive, hands-on experience in software engineering with an understanding of large-scale computing solutions (primarily AWS), including software design and development, database architectures, IP networking, security, cloud operations, and performance tuning

[Required] Demonstrated, hands-on expertise building and maturing SRE and observability practices at scale, able tpersonally raise the technical bar for a dedicated SRE/monitoring team, not just consume their output

[Required] Demonstrated track record owning the definition and governance of SLOs and SLAs for mission-critical systems, and personally driving resilience engineering practices (chaos engineering, load/performance testing) tvalidate reliability ahead of incidents

[Required] Demonstrated track record driving reliability through a data-driven culture, waste/toil reduction, cloud efficiency measures, and performance optimization, treating metrics as the primary lens for every decision

[Required] Experience defining, instrumenting, and acting on software delivery performance metrics (DORA metrics, cycle time, deployment frequency, lead time, etc.) tdrive engineering improvement initiatives

[Required] Strong consultative, communication, team player, and analytical skills, with the ability tregularly interact between various teams distributed across the US

[Required] Strong technical team leadership and technical project management skills

[Required] Relevant experience leading highly technical team members through adopting new technologies while maintaining highly available, mission-critical systems, with a proven track record of success

[Required] Ability tclearly communicate verbally and in writing tbusiness and technology leaders, architects, developers, and team members

[Required] Must be able tcollaborate effectively with a group of high-performing, technical individuals

[Required] Experience acting as a product owner, defining roadmap, requirements, and priorities, for a platform capability such as observability, ideally in partnership with a separate team that owns the underlying tooling and operations

[Required] Experience with architecting, implementing, and maintaining highly available mission-critical environments for 24x7 availability

[Required] Demonstrated history of working within deadlines and ability twork well under pressure

[Required] Experience managing work tasks using Agile methodology/scrum desired

[Preferred] Comfort with ambiguity and demonstrated ability tlead complex programs in a decentralized environment

[Preferred] Experience working in an environment with a defined production change control process; experience working with audits and compliance or in a regulated environment a plus

[Preferred] Experience in organizations with a mature, centralized SRE function, avoiding role/scope overlap

Technical Skills:

[Required] Deep expertise in OpenTelemetry, including instrumentation standards, auto-instrumentation, semantic conventions, and the OTel Collector, as the foundation for a vendor-neutral, paved-road instrumentation strategy

[Required] Hands-on experience with metrics engines and time-series databases, including Prometheus and PromQL, plus scale-out options such as Mimir, Thanos, VictoriaMetrics, or Amazon Managed Prometheus, including cardinality management

[Required] Hands-on experience with tracing and logging backends such as Tempo/Jaeger, Loki/Elastic/Splunk (Splunk is common in financial services), and AWS X-Ray

[Required] Experience with Kubernetes and Kafka observability specifically, including EKS metrics, kube-state-metrics, consumer lag, and broker health

[Required] Experience with alerting and incident tooling such as PagerDuty or Opsgenie, including ServiceNow integration, alert routing, and noise reduction

[Required] Hands-on experience with SLO-as-code frameworks such as OpenSLO, Sloth, or Nobl9, defining and governing SLOs in the reprather than only in a vendor UI

[Required] Experience delivering golden paths and templates (Terraform modules, Helm charts, pipeline templates) that ship with logging, metrics, tracing, dashboards, alerts, and SLdefaults out of the box

[Required] Experience with resilience validation practices, including chaos engineering (e.g., AWS FIS, Gremlin) and load/performance testing

[Required] Deep, hands-on mastery of observability tooling and practices (metrics, distributed tracing, centralized logging, dashboards, alerting), e.g., Datadog, PrometheGrafana, CloudWatch, or equivalent, sufficient televate, not just consume, a dedicated SRE team s capability

[Required] Deep understanding of SRE principles including SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, incident management, and postmortem culture, with a track record of driving adoption and maturity

[Required] Fluency in the Golden Signals, RED, and USE methods as applied frameworks for monitoring and alerting design

[Required] Hands-on experience with: Terraform, Kubernetes, Jenkins or other CI/CD tooling, Kafka, Github, and configuration management tools such as Puppet, Chef, or Ansible

[Required] Deep, hands-on expertise with infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tools and practices (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation, CDK, Pulumi), with a track record of driving IaC adoption at scale across a cloud platform organization

[Required] Relevant experience with configuration and implementation of IaaS, Infrastructure as Code, AWS, Azure, etc.

[Required] Expert working knowledge of infrastructure design and components, such as servers, operating systems, networks, and storage

[Required] Basic understanding of good delivery practices and continual integration and improvement; Agile/Lean background for projects and project delivery

[Preferred] Experience with telemetry pipeline tools such as Fluent Bit, Vector, or Cribl for routing, sampling, redaction, and cost control

[Preferred] Experience with synthetic monitoring, real user monitoring (RUM), and eBPF-based observability

[Preferred] Familiarity with audit-grade telemetry practices (log retention/immutability, PII and sensitive-data scrubbing, access controls on observability data) and mapping observability controls tcompliance frameworks such as CIS, NIST, or SIFMU-specific resilience requirements

[Preferred] Familiarity with engineering metrics/analytics platforms (e.g., LinearB, Jellyfish, Sleuth, Haystack, or internal equivalents) used ttrack DORA metrics and delivery performance

[Preferred] Competent in all phases of application development and implementation, including SDLC; hands-on scripting/development skills in Python, Ruby, Go, Java, etc. in a corporate environment strongly desired

[Preferred] Experience establishing IaC governance and standards (module libraries, policy-as-code, drift detection) across multiple teams or business units

[Preferred] Experience building a metrics-driven engineering culture, including scorecards, dashboards, or leadership reporting on delivery performance

Education and/or Experience:

[Required] Bachelor s degree, preferably in a technical discipline (Computer Science, Mathematics, etc.), or equivalent combination of education and experience required; Master s degree and relevant experience alsconsidered

[Required] 10+ years experience in IT systems installation, operations, administration, and maintenance of cloud systems / virtualized servers, including 5+ years in a technical leadership role

[Preferred] Experience working in a financial services or highly regulated environment preferred

Certificates or Licenses:

[Required] AWS Solutions Architect Associate Certification or higher strongly desired

[Preferred] Relevant industry certifications such as Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud