Director of Platform Engineering

Role Overview

The Director of Platform Engineering owns the shared platform services layer that powers multiple client product lines. You will lead the architecture, delivery, and operational health of platform services—such as payments, reporting, messaging, authentication, and search—consumed daily by six product verticals.

Key Responsibilities

Platform Services Ownership & Architecture (Primary)

• Own the platform shared services roadmap and delivery, including: Payments, Reporting (QuickSight/Redshift), SMS/Messaging, Authentication/Identity, Search, API Gateway, Tenant Management, Configuration, File Upload, and Forms.
• Standardize platform services across products ("if three applications implement it, Platform owns it").
• Establish multi-tenant patterns for isolation and row-level filtering aligned to jurisdiction hierarchy (State, County, Municipal).
• Modernize the platform stack using event-driven and serverless architectures (EventBridge, Lambda, microservices/serverless patterns).
• Partner with the AI team to enable AI platform capabilities (RAG pipelines, chatbot infrastructure, data extraction, MCP integration).

Cross-Product Integration & Stakeholder Management

• Act as the primary engineering point of contact for product teams consuming platform services.
• Translate business urgency into engineering sequencing and manage competing priorities across a multi-product organization.
• Own integration planning for onboarding new products to platform services (e.g., SMS rollout, QuickSight reporting).
• Align teams on API contracts, integration patterns, and shared dependencies.
• Communicate platform tradeoffs and constraints clearly to non-technical stakeholders.

Team Leadership & Delivery

• Lead two engineering teams: Platform Core (Reporting, Payments, general APIs) and App Designer/Studio.
• Manage sprint planning and delivery cadence (2-week sprints, Thursday–Wednesday) and release management.
• Run a 60/40 capacity model (60% planned features; 40% buffer for production support, bugs, and cross-team requests).
• Mentor engineers to grow mid-level talent into senior contributors.

Infrastructure & DevOps Improvement

• Improve CI/CD pipelines to increase deployment frequency and reliability.
• Drive infrastructure-as-code and AWS operational excellence across serverless platform architecture.
• Enhance monitoring, alerting, and incident response.
• Lead disaster recovery planning and execution (RTO mentioned but cut off in the source text).

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years in software engineering with significant experience in platform/services/API-layer architecture and AI experience.
• 5+ years leading engineering teams, including distributed or offshore teams.
• Strong AWS serverless architecture experience: Lambda, API Gateway, EventBridge, SQS/SNS, RDS, Redshift.
• Proven experience building and operating shared services consumed by multiple product teams.
• Experience managing competing priorities across multiple product lines.
• Experience in regulated environments (government, finance, or healthcare).
• Proficiency in Node.js and TypeScript (primary platform language).

Nice-to-Have / Implied

• Experience with multi-tenant B2B/B2B2C architectures.
• Experience integrating with AI/RAG/chatbot systems and data extraction pipelines.
• Platform modernization and operational excellence in production environments.