Sr. Director, Platform Engineering

Sr. Director, Platform Engineering

The Senior Director, Platform Engineering leads the strategy, development, and operations of our enterprise Cloud Platform across Azure and GCP. This role owns the Continuous Delivery Platform built on Kubernetes, drives FinOps discipline to optimize cloud spend, and ensures teams can build, ship, and run software with speed and confidence. You will shape the modern DevOps tech stack and champion infrastructure automation through Terraform, enabling engineering teams across the organization to deliver at scale. Your leadership will directly impact developer productivity, system reliability, and the pace of innovation.

The responsibilities include:

• Define and execute the multi-cloud platform strategy across Azure and GCP, ensuring architectural consistency, security, and scalability.
• Lead the design and evolution of shared platform services — networking, identity, compute, storage, and observability — as self-service capabilities for product engineering teams.
• Own the API gateway and service mesh layer (Istio), enabling secure, observable, and resilient service-to-service communication across the platform.
• Evaluate emerging cloud-native technologies and make build-vs-buy decisions that balance innovation with operational sustainability.
• Partner with Security, Architecture, and Compliance teams to embed governance and policy-as-code into every layer of the platform.
• Own and evolve the enterprise Continuous Delivery Platform built on Kubernetes, enabling teams to build, test, ship, and schedule workloads reliably.
• Drive adoption of modern CI/CD pipelines, container orchestration, GitOps workflows, and progressive delivery practices (canary, blue-green, feature flags).
• Champion developer experience (DevEx) as a first-class product — reducing friction from code commit to production through self-service tooling, golden paths, and internal developer portals.
• Lead the infrastructure-as-code practice using Terraform, ensuring all cloud resources are provisioned, versioned, and managed through automated, repeatable pipelines.
• Drive the DevOps culture and toolchain strategy — standardizing on modern practices for configuration management, secrets management, service mesh, and policy enforcement.
• Define and own the enterprise observability strategy — ensuring comprehensive monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting across all platform services and application workloads.
• Lead the implementation and standardization of monitoring toolchains (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Azure Monitor, Google Cloud Operations Suite) to provide real-time visibility into system health and performance.
• Own the platform's event streaming and messaging infrastructure built on Apache Kafka, enabling reliable, high-throughput, real-time data pipelines across the organization.
• Lead the strategy and operations of the Istio service mesh and API gateway layer, providing traffic management, mutual TLS, rate limiting, and fine-grained access control across microservices.
• Establish and lead the FinOps practice, creating visibility, accountability, and optimization of cloud spend across Azure and GCP.
• Build, mentor, and scale a high-performing platform engineering organization spanning SRE, DevOps, cloud infrastructure, observability, and FinOps disciplines.
• Serve as the primary technology leader for cloud platform and delivery infrastructure, communicating strategy, roadmaps, and trade-offs to executive leadership.

Who You Are:

• 15+ years of progressive experience in software engineering, infrastructure, or platform engineering, with at least 5 years in senior leadership roles managing managers.
• Deep hands-on background in cloud platforms (Azure and/or GCP required; multi-cloud experience strongly preferred).
• Proven experience building and operating Kubernetes-based platforms at enterprise scale, including container orchestration, Istio service mesh, and workload scheduling.
• Strong expertise in API gateway architecture, service mesh (Istio), traffic management, and microservices communication patterns.
• Demonstrated experience with enterprise observability and monitoring platforms (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or equivalent), including SLI/SLO frameworks and incident management.
• Hands-on knowledge of event streaming and messaging platforms, particularly Apache Kafka, for building real-time data pipelines at scale.
• Strong command of infrastructure-as-code practices with Terraform and modern DevOps toolchains (CI/CD, GitOps, observability, secrets management).
• Demonstrated success standing up or maturing a FinOps function, including cost optimization, tagging strategies, and cloud financial governance.
• Track record of building high-performing engineering teams with a culture of ownership, operational excellence, and continuous delivery.
• Excellent executive communication skills — able to translate complex technical strategies into business outcomes for non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience driving platform adoption and developer experience as an internal product, using metrics and feedback loops to guide investment.
• Strong knowledge of DORA metrics, SRE principles, and modern reliability practices.