Director, Platform & AI Engineering

Root Insurance; United States; Remote; USD 217,000 - 299,000; Full time

Job summary

Root Insurance is seeking a Director, Platform Systems to lead the core engineering infrastructure and AI teams. You will shape multi-year technical strategy, grow engineering managers, and translate platform investments into measurable business outcomes.

The role focuses on AI enablement, CI/CD, AWS infrastructure, and data platforms. You will partner with product and security leadership to align priorities and drive reliability at scale.

Qualifications

• 12+ years in software engineering across individual contributor and management roles.
• 7+ years as a people manager, with experience managing managers.
• Demonstrated success leading platform, infrastructure, or AI/ML engineering organizations.
• Experience setting technical strategy across developer tooling, cloud infrastructure, data platforms, or AI systems.
• Proven track record developing engineering managers and building high-performing, inclusive teams.
• Excellent communication and influence skills with both engineering peers and executive stakeholders.
• Comfortable operating in ambiguity and making principled decisions with incomplete information.

Responsibilities

• Own the strategy and execution for Root's platform engineering and AI engineering functions, including leading teams responsible for AI enablement, CI/CD pipelines, AWS infrastructure, and our data engineering platform.
• Partner with Product, Data Science, Quantitative Science, Security, and business leadership to align platform priorities to Root's highest-leverage opportunities.
• Develop and evolve a talent strategy that attracts, retains, and grows top engineering talent across a multi-team organization at all levels.
• Establish and hold teams to a high bar for reliability, security, and operational excellence across shared infrastructure and AI systems.
• Drive the AI platform roadmap, ensuring Root has the internal tooling, data infrastructure, and deployment patterns necessary to responsibly scale AI-powered features.
• Champion developer productivity, ensuring the DevEx and Infrastructure teams reduce toil, accelerate feedback loops, and establish clear standards across Engineering.
• Cultivate strong engineering managers; build the leadership pipeline and ensure each team is well-led, well-staffed, and has a clear charter.
• Work closely with Engineering leadership to improve the effectiveness of the Engineering organization as a whole.
• Identify and remove systemic blockers across teams, owning cross-functional alignment where platform systems intersect with product delivery.

Skills

Strategic leadership

People management

Communication

Stakeholder influence

Ambiguity tolerance

Tools

AWS

CI/CD

Data platforms

Job description

Root Insurance is seeking a Director, Platform Systems to lead the core engineering infrastructure and AI teams. You will shape multi-year technical strategy, grow engineering managers, and translate platform investments into measurable business outcomes.

The role focuses on AI enablement, CI/CD, AWS infrastructure, and data platforms. You will partner with product and security leadership to align priorities and drive reliability at scale.