Associate Director of Engineering, Platform

Hiive; Vancouver; On-site; CAD 100,000 - 125,000; Full time

Job summary

A fintech/marketplace startup in Vancouver is seeking an Associate Director of Engineering to lead DevOps, SRE, and QA teams. The role involves defining strategies, mentoring staff, and ensuring a robust platform. Ideal candidates have leadership experience in scaling startups, strong technical skills in platform architecture, and excellent communication abilities. Founder's culture with competitive salaries and growth opportunities available.

Benefits

Competitive salary

Employee stock option plan

100% employer-paid health and dental premiums

$20-per-day commuter benefit

Social calendar with team events

Opportunities for growth into leadership roles

Qualifications

• Experience in senior leadership roles managing DevOps, SRE, or QA automation teams.
• Previous work experience at a scaling startup.
• Proven experience in platform architecture and reliability.

Responsibilities

• Leading, mentoring, and growing teams across DevOps, SRE, and QA Automation.
• Overseeing platform engineering teams for organizational alignment.
• Managing hiring and scaling efforts.

Skills

Leadership in DevOps

Platform architecture

Site Reliability Engineering

QA automation

People management

Excellent communication

Tools

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Kubernetes

Terraform

GitHub Actions

Datadog

PostgreSQL

Job description

Associate Director of Engineering, Platform

Recognized as one of Canada’s top startups two years in a row — climbing from #4 in 2024 to #2 in 2025 — Hiive is a fintech/marketplace startup connecting buyers and sellers of stock in venture-backed pre-IPO companies🚀. Thanks to our industry-leading technology and best-in-class sales and trading team, we are home to the fastest-growing marketplace for the stock of “unicorns” on the planet. As a profitable and rapidly growing business backed by US venture capital investors, we are seeking to scale our high-performing team.

Interested in learning more about life at Hiive? Check out our careers page to see how you can grow with us!

As the Associate Director of Engineering, Platform, you will be a leader in the engineering organization, responsible for the operational success, technical strategy, and professional growth of our DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), and QA Engineering teams. With a strong foundation in platform engineering, infrastructure, QA automation, and proven people management skills, you'll oversee multiple teams, drive collaboration, and deliver a scalable, reliable, and high-performing platform. You’ll partner closely with engineering leadership to shape and execute strategies, elevate platform maturity, and champion a supportive engineering culture.

In this role, your responsibilities would include:

• Leading, mentoring, and growing teams across DevOps, SRE, and QA Automation, fostering collaboration, innovation, and continuous improvement.
• Overseeing the platform engineering teams, ensuring alignment with organizational goals and maintaining high performance across all initiatives.
• Conducting regular performance evaluations, providing actionable feedback, and supporting professional development and career progression.
• Managing hiring, onboarding, and scaling efforts as the team and organization grow.
• Assisting in scaling the organization by leading hiring efforts and helping to identify improvements in processes and workflows.
• Guiding technical architecture decisions related to platform, infrastructure, automation, and observability, ensuring solutions are scalable, maintainable, and align with industry best practices.
• Reviewing technical designs, providing expert insights for improvement.
• Proactively identifying gaps and advocating for best practices in reliability, security, automation, and developer experience, and advocate for effective solutions.
• Establishing and upholding standards for platform stability, reliability, quality, performance, and security, ensuring robust monitoring, validation, and response practices.
• Championing continuous improvements to developer productivity and platform usability, supporting product engineering teams in achieving their best work.
• Owning incident response processes, including resolution, post-mortems, root-cause analysis, and continuous improvement activities.

Required Skills:

• Experience in senior leadership roles managing DevOps, SRE, or QA automation teams.
• Previous work experience at a scaling startup.
• Proven experience in platform architecture, site reliability engineering, automation, and DevOps methodologies.
• Demonstrated success in defining platform strategy, architecture, reliability, and automation.
• Strong people management skills with proven ability to mentor, grow, and lead engineering teams.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to clearly engage both technical teams and non-technical stakeholders across product and engineering.

Preferred Skills:

• Experience with Amazon Web Services (AWS), particularly with strong proficiency in EKS, RDS, and VPC.
• Experience with Kubernetes, Terraform, GitHub Actions for CI/CD pipelines, and Datadog for observability tooling.
• Previous experience working with and optimizing PostgreSQL.
• Experience with Cloudflare and Vercel.
• Experience with Playwright or similar test automation frameworks.
• Strong understanding of security best practices in platform engineering.
• Experience in regulated or high-compliance environments.
• Experience completing SOC2 or similar certifications.
• Experience working with Elixir.

Compensation, Benefits & Perks:

• Highly competitive salary commensurate with experience and contribution.
• Opportunity to participate in ownership of a rapidly growing early-stage startup through our employee stock option plan.
• Comprehensive 100% employer-paid health and dental premiums, a health and personal spending account.
• A dedicated desk in our Vancouver, BC HQ, in the heart of downtown, with a fridge stocked with healthy snacks and drinks, an onsite gym, and a gorgeous rooftop amenity.
• Enjoy a $20-per-day commuter benefit for every day you work in our Vancouver HQ.
• An engaging social calendar, including bi-weekly catered lunches, bi-weekly “Friday bar,” team workouts, annual summer party, and holiday party, two “onsite” all-team retreats each year, semi-annual team-building events, and Hiive Womens’ Network events.
• Significant opportunities for growth into team leadership and management roles.
• Entrepreneurial culture and a small and dynamic team.
• Sponsorship, immigration, and relocation for exceptional candidates.

Hiive is committed to fostering an inclusive workplace where all individuals have an opportunity to succeed.