Director of Platform Engineering. Reston LilyLifestyle

Director Of Platform Engineering

The Director of Platform Engineering owns the shared services layer that powers all of the clients product lines. This role is responsible for the architecture, delivery, and operational health of platform services that six product verticals depend on daily. The Director leads two engineering teams, drives cross-product integration, and partners with product leadership to balance competing priorities across a complex stakeholder landscape.

This is a platform services leadership role that requires deep technical judgment, strong delivery management, and the ability to navigate a multi-product organization.

Key Responsibilities

Platform Services Ownership & Architecture (Primary)

• Own the architecture, roadmap, and delivery of Platform's shared services:
  Payments, Reporting (Quick Sight/Redshift), SMS/Messaging, Authentication/Identity, Search, API Gateway, Tenant Management, Configuration, File Upload, and Forms
• Drive standardization of platform services across products, applying the design rule: if three applications implement it, Platform owns it
• Establish and evolve multi-tenant patterns that support clients jurisdiction hierarchy (State, County, Municipal)
• Lead modernization of the platform stack, including event-driven architectures (Event Bridge, Lambda), microservices, and serverless patterns
• Partner with the AI team to design platform services that enable AI capabilities (RAG pipelines, chatbot infrastructure, data extraction, MCP integration)

Cross-Product Integration & Stakeholder Management

• Serve as the primary engineering point of contact for product teams consuming platform services
• Navigate competing priorities from multiple product leaders and executive stakeholders, translating business urgency into engineering sequencing
• Own integration planning for new product onboarding onto platform services (e.g., SMS rollout; Quick Sight reporting)
• Drive cross-team alignment on API contracts, integration patterns, and shared dependencies
• Communicate platform capabilities, constraints, and tradeoffs to non-technical stakeholders clearly and directly

Team Leadership & Delivery

• Lead two engineering teams:
  Platform Core (across Reporting, Payments, general API) and App Designer
• Own sprint planning, delivery cadence (2-week sprints, Thursday to Wednesday), and release management
• Manage the 60/40 capacity model: 60% planned feature work, 40% buffer for production support, bugs, and cross-team requests
• Mentor engineers at varying levels, with particular attention to developing mid-level talent into senior contributors
• Foster a culture of ownership, delivery discipline, and bias for action

Infrastructure & Dev Ops Improvement

• Own and improve CI/CD pipelines to increase deployment frequency and reliability
• Drive infrastructure-as-code practices and AWS operational excellence across the platform's serverless architecture
• Improve monitoring, alerting, and incident response processes
• Lead disaster recovery planning and execution (current RTO target: 4 hours)
• Identify opportunities for cloud cost optimization and operational efficiency

Security & Compliance

• Embed security into development workflows (vulnerability scanning, SBOM generation, code quality tooling)
• Partner with security leadership on compliance requirements appropriate to government customers
• Manage access controls, secrets management, and data protection across platform services