Platform Engineering Director – Cloud, IoT & Scale

NRG Energy; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 265,000 - 340,000; Full time

Job summary

NRG Energy, owner of Vivint Smart Home, seeks a Technical Director to set the technical vision for Vivint's Platform Engineering. You will define strategy across cloud services, event pipelines, APIs, and infrastructure for millions of connected homes, partnering with Mobile and Embedded teams to ensure end-to-end integration.

This senior principal IC role requires leading architectural changes, guiding standards for reliability and security, and advising executives on major platform

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field, or equivalent experience.
• 15+ years building and operating production software systems, incl. 5+ years in principal-level or equivalent leadership.
• Track record setting technical direction for large engineering org (multiple teams).
• Deep expertise in large-scale distributed systems and cloud-native architecture (GCP/AWS, Kubernetes, event-driven).
• Experience leading platform architecture changes and migrations, from strategy to delivery.
• Proven ability to influence peer organizations and executives without direct authority.
• Strong written communication and ability to author technical strategy docs.

Responsibilities

• Define the multi-year technical vision and architecture roadmap for Platform Engineering.
• Drive architecture decisions across the platform, including services, shared components, data flows and APIs.
• Collaborate with Mobile and Embedded teams to align interfaces and protocols.
• Establish and govern standards for reliability, security, scalability, observability and developer productivity.
• Advise executives on platform investments, build-vs-buy, and technical risk.
• Lead technical reviews of high-impact initiatives across platform, mobile and device systems.
• Identify systemic debt and drive multi-team remediation plans.

Skills

Distributed systems

Cloud-native architecture

GCP/AWS

Kubernetes

Event-driven systems

Technical leadership

Executive influence

Technical writing

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Tools

MQTT

Job description

NRG Energy, owner of Vivint Smart Home, seeks a Technical Director to set the technical vision for Vivint's Platform Engineering. You will define strategy across cloud services, event pipelines, APIs, and infrastructure for millions of connected homes, partnering with Mobile and Embedded teams to ensure end-to-end integration.

This senior principal IC role requires leading architectural changes, guiding standards for reliability and security, and advising executives on major platform