Head of Platform Engineering

XYZ Venture Capital; Toronto; On-site; CAD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity available

Medical, dental, vision coverage

3 weeks vacation + sick days

Home office stipend $500

Job summary

Rootly in Toronto is seeking a founding Head of Platform to shape and own the infrastructure and developer platform that powers our incident response and on-call for world‑class engineering teams.

You will lead a high‑performing Platform Eng organization, drive reliability, scalability, and cost efficiency, and craft an exceptional developer experience that accelerates product delivery while maintaining safety and observability.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in platform, infrastructure, SRE, or DevOps with increasing leadership responsibility.
• Experience leading platform/SRE teams, including hiring, mentoring, and building culture.
• Deep expertise with cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred), distributed systems, scaling and redundancy.
• Proven experience designing or operating high-scale production systems with operational maturity.
• Strong background in observability, performance tuning, and scaling strategies.
• Comfortable writing production-grade software to solve infrastructure problems; Ruby or Go is a plus.
• Strong architectural judgment and systems thinking for anticipating scaling pain.

Responsibilities

• Own the vision, strategy, and roadmap for Rootly’s infrastructure and developer platform.
• Build and lead a high-performing Platform Engineering organization spanning SRE, infra, DevEx, and tooling.
• Establish a culture where reliability, performance, and developer experience are non-negotiables.
• Drive execution from concept to completion with ownership and urgency.
• Architect a highly available, scalable infrastructure foundation and manage capacity planning.
• Lead observability tooling, monitoring, incident response, and runbooks improvement.
• Collaborate with Product and Engineering to align platform investments with company strategy.
• Recruit, mentor, and develop top-tier platform engineers and culture of excellence.

Skills

Platform leadership

SRE

DevOps

AWS

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Observability

Ruby

Go

Tools

AWS

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Job description

About Rootly

At Rootly, we are on a mission to be the go-to way companies respond when things go wrong, helping every organization be more reliable. We do this by building an industry‑leading incident management platform that allows companies around the world consistently and quickly resolve incidents.

Customers love Rootly. Some of the fastest growing companies around the world – such as NVIDIA, Figma, Canva, Tripadvisor, Squarespace and more – rely on Rootly to power their critical incident management process. Investors love Rootly and we are backed by respected funds worldwide.

About The Role

This is a rare opportunity to join Rootly as the founding leader of Platform Engineering and to shape the foundation that powers incident response and on‑call for some of the world’s most forward‑thinking engineering teams.

As Head of Platform, you will own two critical outcomes for the company:

• Infrastructure Reliability and Scale – building a rock‑solid, redundant, scalable, operationally mature, and cost‑efficient infrastructure platform that supports our next tenfold of growth.
• Developer Experience and Velocity – crafting a world‑class developer experience that enables product engineers to move extremely fast, with safety and confidence.

This is not a traditional ops role. It is a high‑leverage engineering leadership position for someone who combines deep technical skill, systems thinking, taste, and the ability to inspire teams to raise the bar.

What You’ll Do

Platform Leadership and Vision

• Own the vision, strategy, and roadmap for Rootly’s infrastructure and developer platform.
• Build and lead a high‑performing Platform Engineering organization that may include SRE, infrastructure, DevEx, and internal tooling.
• Establish a culture where reliability, performance, and developer experience are non‑negotiables.
• Act like an owner: spot problems early, mobilize teams, and drive solutions from concept to completion.

Infrastructure Reliability and Scale

• Architect a highly available, redundant, and scalable infrastructure foundation.
• Lead capacity planning, cost management, performance tuning, and long‑term infrastructure scaling.
• Drive operational maturity through infrastructure as code, declarative infrastructure, configuration management, and repeatable automation.

Developer Experience And Productivity

• Enable product engineers to move extremely quickly by optimizing local dev environments, ephemeral cloud environments, fast CI and CD, and reliable canaries.
• Provide tooling that abstracts infrastructure complexity and removes friction from development.
• Ensure every engineer can ship confidently, frequently, and safely.

Reliability, Observability, and Incident Response

• Own platform‑wide SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets and use them to drive prioritization.
• Oversee observability tooling, monitoring, alerting, and incident response processes.
• Partner with product engineering teams to ensure services meet reliability and performance goals and improve runbooks and post‑mortems.

Execution, Communication, and Leadership

• Drive high‑quality execution with urgency while balancing long‑term bets with tactical wins.
• Raise the bar and inspire engineers to think bigger, move faster, and deliver exceptional results.
• Collaborate closely with Product, Engineering, and leadership to align platform investments with company strategy.
• Recruit, mentor, and develop top‑tier platform engineers and create a culture of excellence.

What We Are Looking For

We care about impact, ownership, and technical judgement. Degrees and big‑name logos are not required.

Minimum Qualifications

• 10+ years in platform, infrastructure, SRE, or DevOps roles, with increasing leadership responsibility.
• Experience leading platform or SRE teams, including hiring, mentoring, and building culture.
• Deep expertise with cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred), distributed systems, scaling, and redundancy.
• Proven experience designing or operating high‑scale production systems and delivering operational maturity.
• Strong background in observability, performance tuning, and scaling strategies.
• Comfortable writing production‑grade software to solve infrastructure problems; Ruby or Go is a plus.
• Strong architectural judgement and systems thinking that anticipates scaling pain before it becomes real.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience delivering DevEx tooling that materially improved developer velocity.
• Experience navigating startup to hyper‑growth transitions and scaling infrastructure and teams accordingly.
• High standards for taste and craftsmanship in platform engineering.
• Exceptional communicator, able to translate complex technical decisions for technical and non‑technical audiences.
• Bias toward action with the judgment to optimize versus ship at the right times.

What Success Looks Like

• By 6 to 12 months you will have built a small but elite Platform team with clear ownership and high morale.
• Dramatically accelerated engineering velocity with faster deploys, shorter tests, and fewer bottlenecks.
• Established high‑availability infrastructure with clear SLOs and stronger reliability across the board.
• Delivered developer tooling that makes engineering faster and more enjoyable.
• Positioned Rootly to scale tenfold in customers, traffic, and complexity.

Why Rootly?

• Competitive compensation and early equity in a fast‑growing, venture‑backed company.
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• 3 weeks of vacation, plus unlimited sick and mental health days, and a company‑wide end‑of‑year shutdown to recharge.
• $500 stipend for home office setup.
• Unlimited token usage and access to AI tools.
• A fast‑moving, high‑impact environment where your leadership and ideas directly shape the future of the company.

Rootly is an equal opportunity employer. We aim to create an environment where every team member at Rootly feels like they belong so they can have a greater impact on our business and customers. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.