Senior Platform Engineering & Operations Leader

Denali Therapeutics; South San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 159,000 - 207,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401k

Healthcare coverage

ESPP

Job summary

Denali Therapeutics is seeking a proven Platform Engineering leader to set the operational agenda, scale the IT Infrastructure function, and drive reliability across a multi-site footprint including South San Francisco. You will own governance, risk management, and incident response, partnering with Architecture, IT Risk, and business stakeholders.

In this role you will lead a multidisciplinary team of employees, consultants, and contractors, establish operating cadences, and ensure SOX, GxP,

Qualifications

• 10+ years IT experience with platform engineering, infrastructure, IT service management, or IT operations.
• 3+ years direct team leadership, building management structures and accountability.
• Experience setting and driving operational agenda and contributing to enterprise strategy.
• Proven ability to maintain standards through attrition and competing priorities.
• Experience operationalizing vulnerability management, patching, and sustained disciplines as SLA-driven programs.
• Experience operating Platform Engineering within an architectural governance framework.
• Direct experience in regulated life sciences environments (GxP, 21 CFR Part 11, SOX ITGC).
• Hands-on ITIL-aligned service management (incident, change, problem, SLA).
• Experience with enterprise network, multi-cloud, observability tooling, and AI infra.

Responsibilities

• Lead IT Infrastructure as a function, owning the operational agenda and standards.
• Build and maintain management structures, cadences, escalation paths, and accountability mechanisms.
• Anticipate risks, capacity constraints, attrition, and capability gaps to prevent service impact.
• Guide Platform Engineering decisions within architectural governance and ARB forums.
• Represent Platform Engineering to peers and contribute to enterprise platform strategy including AI infrastructure.

Skills

Leadership

Strategic thinking

Communication

Risk management

Regulatory/compliance

Cross-functional collaboration

Project management

Tools

Workato

Databricks

Reltio

ITIL

AWS

GCP

Azure

Job description

Denali Therapeutics is seeking a proven Platform Engineering leader to set the operational agenda, scale the IT Infrastructure function, and drive reliability across a multi-site footprint including South San Francisco. You will own governance, risk management, and incident response, partnering with Architecture, IT Risk, and business stakeholders.

In this role you will lead a multidisciplinary team of employees, consultants, and contractors, establish operating cadences, and ensure SOX, GxP,