Sr. Director, Platform Engineering

About the role

The Senior Director, Platform Engineering leads the strategy, development, and operations of our enterprise Cloud Platform across Azure and GCP. This role owns the Continuous Delivery Platform built on Kubernetes, drives FinOps discipline to optimize cloud spend, and ensures teams can build, ship, and run software with speed and confidence. You will shape the modern DevOps tech stack and champion infrastructure automation through Terraform, enabling engineering teams across the organization to deliver at scale. Your leadership will directly impact developer productivity, system reliability, and the pace of innovation. What You'll Do CLOUD PLATFORM STRATEGY & ENGINEERING Define and execute the multi-cloud platform strategy across Azure and GCP, ensuring architectural consistency, security, and scalability. Lead the design and evolution of shared platform services - networking, identity, compute, storage, and observability - as self-service capabilities for product engineering teams. Own the API gateway and service mesh layer (Istio), enabling secure, observable, and resilient service-to-service communication across the platform. Evaluate emerging cloud-native technologies and make build-vs-buy decisions that balance innovation with operational sustainability. Partner with Security, Architecture, and Compliance teams to embed governance and policy-as-code into every layer of the platform. CONTINUOUS DELIVERY & DEVELOPER EXPERIENCE Own and evolve the enterprise Continuous Delivery Platform built on Kubernetes, enabling teams to build, test, ship, and schedule workloads reliably. Drive adoption of modern CI/CD pipelines, container orchestration, GitOps workflows, and progressive delivery practices (canary, blue-green, feature flags). Champion developer experience (DevEx) as a first-class product - reducing friction from code commit to production through self-service tooling, golden paths, and internal developer portals. Establish and track platform adoption metrics (deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, MTTR) aligned with DORA benchmarks. INFRASTRUCTURE AUTOMATION & DEVOPS EXCELLENCE Lead the infrastructure-as-code practice using Terraform, ensuring all cloud resources are provisioned, versioned, and managed through automated, repeatable pipelines. Drive the DevOps culture and toolchain strategy - standardizing on modern practices for configuration management, secrets management, service mesh, and policy enforcement. Build and maintain reusable Terraform modules, landing zones, and account/project vending solutions that accelerate onboarding of new workloads and teams. Ensure infrastructure changes flow through the same CI/CD rigor as application code, with automated testing, drift detection, and compliance checks. OBSERVABILITY, MONITORING & EVENT STREAMING Define and own the enterprise observability strategy - ensuring comprehensive monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting across all platform services and application workloads. Lead the implementation and standardization of monitoring toolchains (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Azure Monitor, Google Cloud Operations Suite) to provide real-time visibility into system health and performance. Own the platform's event streaming and messaging infrastructure built on Apache Kafka, enabling reliable, high-throughput, real-time data pipelines across the organization. Establish SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets as the foundation for reliability decisions, partnering with product engineering teams to drive a culture of proactive incident prevention. Ensure distributed tracing and service dependency mapping are in place across the Istio service mesh, enabling rapid root cause analysis during incidents. API GATEWAY & SERVICE MESH MANAGEMENT Lead the strategy and operations of the Istio service mesh and API gateway layer, providing traffic management, mutual TLS, rate limiting, and fine-grained access control across microservices. Define and enforce API lifecycle management standards - versioning, deprecation policies, schema governance, and developer documentation. Partner with application teams to optimize service-to-service communication patterns, latency, and resilience through circuit breaking, retries, and intelligent routing. Ensure API gateway and mesh configurations are managed as code, fully integrated into the CI/CD pipeline with automated canary analysis and rollback. FINOPS & CLOUD FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT Establish and lead the FinOps practice, creating visibility, accountability, and optimization of cloud spend across Azure and GCP. Implement cost allocation frameworks (tagging, showback/chargeback) that tie cloud consumption to business units, products, and teams. Partner with Finance, Procurement, and Engineering leadership to forecast cloud budgets, manage committed-use agreements, and identify savings opportunities. Build dashboards and reporting cadences that keep cloud costs transparent from engine

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Company Intel

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