Director of Platform Engineering

Job Description

Grata is the leading private market deal making platform. We make it easy to find, research, and engage with private companies while powering end‑to‑end M&A business development workflows. Our platform delivers the most comprehensive, accurate, and searchable proprietary data on private companies, their financials, and their owners.

We are looking for a Director of Platform Engineering to lead the foundational systems that power Grata’s data, AI, and product surfaces. This role owns the platforms our engineering, data, and AI teams build on, including data ingestion and orchestration, internal developer tooling, infrastructure, and the agentic runtime that underpins our next generation of deal making workflows.

You will lead Grata’s Platform team end‑to‑end: setting the multi‑year strategy, owning execution and operational health, and growing the engineers on the team, while partnering with senior leaders across Engineering, Product, Data and AI to scale Grata’s technical foundation as the business grows.

Grata is a hybrid company, with in‑office collaboration in NYC on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays.

As Director of Platform Engineering, you will be accountable for platform strategy, team health, and engineering execution across the systems that power Grata’s product, data, and AI surfaces. You will partner with senior leaders in Engineering, Product, Data, AI, and Design.

• Set and own a multi‑year vision for Grata’s platform, including infrastructure, orchestration, developer experience, and the agentic runtime; and translate it into a prioritized, funded roadmap.
• Lead the Platform team directly, including hiring, leveling, performance management, coaching, and career development for the engineers on the team.
• Own the outcomes of the team’s efforts: successful platform deliveries, incremental value to product‑facing teams, and shared commercial wins.
• Own the operational health of platform services, including reliability, performance, cost, and security; and the SLAs that product‑facing teams depend on.
• Drive cross‑functional initiatives that span Platform, Product, Data, and AI, including major architectural evolutions and platform migrations.
• Balance near‑term delivery with long‑term technical health, making explicit trade‑offs on technical debt, build‑vs‑buy, and platform investment.
• Partner with Finance and engineering leadership on capacity planning, vendor strategy, and infrastructure spend.
• Represent Platform in company‑level planning and communicate strategy clearly to technical and non‑technical audiences, up to and including the executive team.
• Establish and evolve healthy team practices across planning, execution, quality, and operational excellence; and foster a culture of high ownership, psychological safety, and sustainable pace.
• This role is primarily focused on team leadership and platform strategy, with hands‑on technical engagement as needed to guide architecture, unblock the team, and support high‑impact initiatives.

• Scaling the platform that powers Grata’s M&A business development platform and the agentic workflows built on top of it.
• Designing and operating the data, orchestration, and runtime systems that ingest, enrich, and serve Grata’s proprietary private‑company data at scale.
• Building the agent runtime, tool‑use infrastructure, and evaluation systems that AI and product teams use to ship reliable agentic experiences.
• Investing in developer experience, including CI/CD, observability, environments, and internal tooling, so product teams can ship safely and quickly.
• Partnering with Product, Data, and AI leadership to align platform investments with where the business is heading next.

• Multiple years of experience leading platform or infrastructure engineering teams as a director, senior manager, or equivalent.
• Track record of setting a multi‑quarter platform strategy and delivering against it.
• Strong technical depth in distributed systems, and in event‑driven and asynchronous architectures.
• Language‑agnostic technical credibility: comfortable partnering with engineers across modern full‑stack…