Engineering Director, Agentic Platform

About the role

The Agentic Platform is the foundation layer of Copperleaf R&D. Everything the other two pillars ship, core product capability and AI-powered applications, runs on infrastructure, data, and services this team owns. As Director you will lead the pillar: five cells spanning cloud infrastructure, data platform, AI platform, extensions and integrations, and shared services.

This is one of the most strategic technical leadership positions in the company. The platform carries our Azure transition, our next-generation AI infrastructure, and the modernization of a product surface trusted by critical-infrastructure customers worldwide. You will report directly to the VP of R&D, and your decisions will set the ceiling on how fast the entire R&D organization can move.

What you'll do

• Lead the Engineering pillar. Own delivery, quality, and operations across the five cells. Hire, grow, and retain the managers and senior engineers who run them, and build the succession depth so no part of the platform depends on one person.
• Own the platform layers of the future architecture. In the target-state architecture the pillar owns the Platform Control Plane, the Platform Service Layer, and Deployment and Tenancy Options: shared capabilities certified once and consumed by every product, domain service, and agent, with tenancy models spanning dedicated and regulated, shared multi-tenant, and sovereign cloud.
• Finish the cloud transition. Complete the move to Azure, including the analytics platform on Microsoft Fabric, and retire legacy Windows-era infrastructure on a committed timeline.
• Industrialize our AI infrastructure. Take our new AI Agentic Platform from early adopter to production grade: multi-tenancy, compliance-ready pipelines, and the cloud-native foundation for the next generation of AI applications built across R&D.
• Automate the operation. Eliminate R&D-owned manual bottlenecks in provisioning, upgrades, and environment management. Get production support to a state where SLAs are met by design, and Tier 1 ownership can hand off cleanly to Unified Support.
• Scale extension migration. Drive the AI-powered migration of hundreds of customer extensions onto the modern platform, expanding the automated pipeline and closing the gaps it cannot yet handle.
• Run the platform as a product. Your customers are engineers, partners, and Tech Sales. Self-serve environments, a partner-facing API layer, and an emerging MCP surface are the roadmap. Treat internal adoption as the metric that matters.
• Shape the technical roadmap. Partner with the VP of R&D and our Senior Principal Architect on the  technology roadmap, and turn it into a sequenced plan the pillar delivers.

How you think about platform

We are looking for a leader whose operating instincts line up with how we build:

• Build it once at the platform. Identity, observability, security, compliance, CI/CD: certified once, consumed by every service.
• Incremental over big-bang. Every platform shift runs in production from week one. Evolution over revolution, with dates we commit to and hold.
• Automation over heroics. If the operation depends on someone's weekend, the platform isn't done. Manual toil is a backlog item, not a culture.
• Self-serve over ticket queues. A platform that requires your team in the loop for every request is a bottleneck with good intentions.
• AI-native by default. Our operating language is augmentation to delegation. Engineers work with agents, the platform provides the rails that make that fast and safe. Quality discipline survives AI-generated code: specs precede implementation, contracts precede integration.
• Decisions are explicit. Make the trade-offs visible: cost, risk, time-to-value, what we're giving up. Then commit.

What we're looking for

• Depth. 12+ years building and operating production software, with 5+ years leading platform, infrastructure, or cloud engineering organizations.
• Cloud at enterprise grade. You have run Azure and/or AWS platforms carrying enterprise SLAs, and you have owned the operational readiness story, not just the build.
• Data and AI credibility. Fluent in modern data platforms (Fabric, lakehouse architectures, embedded BI) and in running LLM-based systems in production: pipelines, evaluation, cost, and compliance.
• Delivery leadership. A track record of shipping committed scope on real dates across multiple teams, and of saying clearly what will not make the date.
• Talent magnet. Senior engineers choose to work for you, and…