Director of Platform Engineering

* Define technical vision and architecture for cross-cutting priority initiatives, and provide leadership for such product initiatives.
* Drive platform evolution to support scale, performance, and new platform use cases.
* Translate business requirements into well-designed applications while balancing user and business needs, technical competencies, and industry developments.
* Partner with engineering and operations managers to ensure cohesive design patterns, consistent practices, operational excellence, and timely delivery.
* Collaborate with the Clients team to align backend service capabilities with client application requirements and user experience goals.
* Guide decisions on infrastructure, server technologies, programming languages, platforms, and frameworks that best serve organizational goals.
* Manage backend engineering and operations teams, including managers and individual contributors. Set clear expectations, provide feedback, and conduct performance reviews.
* Mentor and coach team members to grow technical and leadership capabilities; create clear career paths and development opportunities.
* Lead recruitment to build a strong engineering organization, including defining needs, interviewing candidates, and building diverse and highly effective teams.
* Foster an inclusive, collaborative engineering culture that attracts and retains top talent; address team health and engagement proactively.
* Manages employees by establishing annual performance goals, allocating resources, assessing annual performance, and determining individual merit, incentive and/or promotional increases. Provides technical oversight and develops standards, guidelines, and processes for application systems.
* Creates plans to translate business requirements into well-designed applications while balancing user and business needs, technical competencies, industry developments, and time constraints.
* Performs other related work as needed.
* Experience leading technical teams and managing direct reports, preferably across multiple teams or product domains.
* Experience with building large scale distributed applications, and supporting production deployment with large customer base.
* Experience leading and coordinating cross cutting initiatives in a product organization, and engaging across functions (e.g. product management, customer engagement).
* 15+ years of professional software engineering experience.
* 10+ years in Python or C/C++.
* 5+ years of technical leadership roles defining architecture and technical direction for complex systems.
* Deep expertise in backend technologies, including database, APIs, micro-services, cloud platform.
* Expertise architecting and designing software/platform-as-a service applications.
* Strong understanding of software development best practices, including testing, CI/CD, and operations (monitoring).
* Experience working directly with customers to understand needs and provide technical solutions.
* Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
* Strong analytical and problem solving skills.
* Excellent organizational skills and constant attention to detail.
* Ability to articulate project needs and effectively communicate with coworkers in a respectful and collaborative manner.
* Effectively prioritize, triage, and manage competing priorities and deadlines.
* Mastery of fundamental concepts, practices, and procedures of software development applications and tools.

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