Head of Platform Engineering

Basis Theory; United States; In loco; USD 180.000 - 240.000; Tempo pieno

Descrizione del lavoro

Kindredventures seeks a Director of Platform Engineering to own the direction, team, and delivery of the Platform function in the United States. You will define health metrics, set priorities, and drive investments that enhance enablement, reliability, and performance for product teams.

This player-coach role requires hands-on leadership, architectural judgment, and a focus on scalable foundations. You will work across security, cost governance, and engineering leadership to ensure robust

Competenze

• Experience leading engineering teams responsible for people, priorities and delivery.
• Track record in taking unclear technical problems and driving improvements through others and your own contributions.
• Hands-on experience with AWS and infrastructure as code (Terraform) and cost management.
• Strong written communication and the ability to explain complex platform decisions clearly.

Mansioni

• Own the Platform roadmap across enablement, reliability, and performance, balancing work you identify with product-team needs.
• Investigate platform gaps before they reach customers with evidence, history, and input from engineers.
• Collaborate with Security to assess vulnerabilities, isolation, and attack surface and translate findings into priorities.
• Turn ambiguous concerns into clear recommendations, stating what matters and what requires investigation.
• Choose proportionate responses and identify targeted changes that reduce risk or unlock constraints.

Conoscenze

Leadership experience

Distributed systems

Observability

AWS

Terraform / IaC

Cost management

Cross-functional collaboration

Written communication

Strumenti

Terraform

Descrizione del lavoro

About the role

We're hiring a Director of Platform Engineering to own the direction, team, and delivery of our Platform function. You'll build a clear view of where the platform is healthy, where it is exposed, and what we should do next. You'll turn that understanding into decisions, priorities, and work that gets delivered.

Platform's goals are enablement, reliability, and performance: product teams build fast on foundations our customers can depend on. Most of the team's work comes from opportunities you and the team identify. You'll work through unclear problems, competing priorities, and cross-team dependencies, and make the case for the investments that matter.

This is a player-coach role. It suits someone who has led a team of engineers and wants to keep building, not someone looking to step away from the code. You'll use your judgment to decide when to build yourself, when to delegate, and when to grow the team. Your responsibility is to make sure the right work gets done and the team gets stronger.

What the Platform team owns

Platform's first customers are our own engineering teams. The team is measured by how confidently the team can ship and by whether the platform holds up as our largest customers grow.

• Enablement. Paved roads, internal tooling, shared libraries, test and release infrastructure, and documentation that let product teams ship without standing up new infrastructure each time.
• Reliability. SLIs, SLOs, and alerting across critical customer journeys, with automated tests and failure experiments that demonstrate resilience.
• Performance and scale. Understanding current and projected loads, tracking changes in latency and capacity, and maintaining headroom for our largest customers and merchants.
• Standards and architecture. Practical patterns for how services are built and operated, developed with our architect and product teams and encoded as automated guardrails where useful.
• Shared foundations. Edge, networking, multi-region infrastructure, observability, and the other systems every product depends on.
• Cost and spend. The platform's contribution to cost of goods sold (COGS), along with infrastructure, tooling, and vendor spend. Understand what drives costs and how they change as usage grows.

What you'll do

Own the direction and understand the risks

• Own the Platform roadmap across enablement, reliability, and performance, balancing work you identify with the needs of product teams.
• Investigate platform gaps before they reach customers. Pull together technical evidence, operational history, and input from engineers to distinguish immediate risks from longer-term improvements.
• Work closely with Security to assess vulnerabilities, isolation, and attack surface, and translate those findings into engineering options and priorities.
• Turn ambiguous concerns into clear recommendations: what matters, what we know, what still needs investigation, and what action you recommend.
• Choose proportionate responses. Identify targeted changes that reduce risk or relieve a constraint, and recognize when a larger investment is warranted.

Own costs and make sound spending decisions

• Make platform costs visible. Work with Finance and engineering leadership to understand COGS and cost to serve by service, workload, or customer where useful, and explain what is driving changes.
• Own planning and forecasting for platform infrastructure, tooling, and vendor spend. Track actuals against the plan, investigate unexpected increases, and surface budget decisions early.
• Identify waste and opportunities to improve unit costs as usage grows. Weigh savings against reliability, performance, security, and the engineering effort required.
• Evaluate build-versus-buy options, vendor pricing, commitments, and renewals with the relevant owners. Make clear recommendations based on total cost and operational value.

Lead and build the team

• Own the team's day-to-day execution: set clear outcomes, assign ownership, unblock people, and keep delivery predictable.
• Delegate meaningful problems with the context, guardrails, and checkpoints engineers need to solve them. Give people room to make decisions while staying accountable for the result.
• Manage and develop engineers through regular feedback, coaching, and clear expectations. Address performance and collaboration issues directly.
• Assess the team's capacity and skill gaps. Build a hiring and development plan, make the case for additional resources, and lead hiring and onboarding with engineering leadership.

Work through the hard parts and get improvements delivered

• Stay technically involved enough to inspect code, traces, designs, and infrastructure, challenge assumptions, and help the team find the actual constraint.
• Scope and sequence work into useful increments, with clear owners, dependencies, and evidence of improvement.
• Work with our architect as a technical partner, drawing on their expertise while retaining accountability for Platform priorities and delivery.
• Resolve cross-team and vendor dependencies. Escalate when progress is blocked and bring leadership clear decisions to make.
• Contribute implementation, debugging, or prototypes where your direct involvement will unblock progress or answer an important question. Build ownership across the team so delivery can continue without you being in every detail.

Build trust across engineering

• Give engineering, product, and security leadership a clear view of platform health, progress, and remaining risk, supported by evidence.
• Make platform tradeoffs explicit. Build agreement on priorities, say no or not yet when appropriate, and surface decisions that require broader leadership input.
• Help product teams adopt shared patterns and tooling. Measure whether those investments improve how teams build and operate software.
• Keep design decisions, standards, and operating documentation current and useful for engineers and AI agents.

What you'll bring

• 7+ years building and running production software or platforms, with a strong foundation in backend or distributed systems.
• Experience leading engineering teams with responsibility for people, priorities, and delivery, including developing engineers and making staffing decisions.
• A track record of taking unclear technical or operational problems, identifying what matters, and driving improvements through other people and your own contributions.
• Technical depth to investigate production behavior, evaluate system designs, and contribute code when needed. You can work with specialists and make informed decisions without needing to personally solve every part.
• Experience making distributed systems reliable and fast, including observability, SLOs, and testing for load and failure.
• Experience building internal platforms, shared foundations, or developer tooling that other teams adopted and relied on.
• Hands-on AWS experience and infrastructure as code, ideally Terraform.
• Experience managing cloud and software spend, understanding cost drivers and unit economics, and making investment decisions that balance cost with engineering and business needs.
• Sound judgment about risk, scope, and sequencing, including knowing when a targeted fix is enough and when to invest in a larger change.
• The ability to work across engineering, product, and security, resolve competing priorities, and bring people along through clear reasoning.
• Clear written communication. You can make a complicated situation understandable and give others enough context to make a decision.

What success looks like

• We have a shared, evidence-backed view of platform health, the most important risks, and what we are doing about them.
• The team delivers improvements that make product engineering faster and the platform more reliable and scalable.
• We understand platform COGS and general spend, can explain changes, and have a credible forecast. Cost improvements support healthy margins as usage grows, with clear tradeoffs for reliability, performance, and security.
• Engineers have clear ownership and grow in their ability to solve problems. The team has a credible plan for the capacity and skills it needs.
• Platform decisions and delivery move forward without depending on the CTO, another engineering leader, or the architect to continually take ownership back.