Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Altana is the network for trusted trade, empowering governments and businesses to build a more resilient global economy. The Senior Director of Platform Engineering will own the cloud infrastructure and developer experience, leading a multidisciplinary organization to enhance engineering excellence and drive AI-first development.
Responsibilities
- Define and own a clear, multi-year technical strategy for Platform Engineering, ensuring the team stays focused on the highest-leverage work while advancing long-term architectural goals
- Set the reference architecture and standards for cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, and developer tooling, balancing immediate operational needs against strategic investment
- Make and guide key decisions on scalability, performance, security, and cost, working closely with engineers on the hardest problems rather than from a distance
- Lead build-vs-buy and platform investment decisions, including which tools, vendors, and open-source technologies to adopt across the SDLC
- Own the Developer Acceleration program: instrument and continuously improve developer workflows, driving measurable gains in build times, PR cycle time, flaky-test rate, and deployment frequency (DORA / SPACE)
- Drive an AI-first, agent-first transformation of the software development lifecycle — making AI coding harnesses and agents reliable, governed, first-class participants in how Altana writes, reviews, tests, and ships code
- Set strategy for integrating AI-assisted development tools and agentic coding harnesses (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, and agent frameworks) into CI/CD, code review, local development, and release pipelines at scale
- Establish how AI-assisted and agent-generated code is reviewed, tested, secured, and governed — including LLM-aware testing strategies, evaluation and guardrails, and the supporting context engineering and tooling that make agents effective in a large monorepo
- Treat the engineering organization as your customer: gather requirements from application teams, translate vague friction into well-scoped platform work, and prove impact through before/after measurement
- Evolve our monorepo strategy — code organization, dependency management, build caching, and testing patterns — so it works consistently across our multi-cloud and compliance-constrained environments
- Establish and continuously improve best practices for monitoring, incident response, automation, and performance optimization across production and the delivery pipeline
- Drive a culture of ownership, resilience, and accountability to ensure high availability, performance, and security in our production environments
- Own reliability and cost across cloud infrastructure; conduct regular post-incident reviews and capacity planning to anticipate and mitigate risk before it reaches customers
- Partner across product, engineering, security, data science, and commercial teams to align platform investment with business objectives
- Communicate trade-offs, constraints, and roadmap clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders, and represent Platform Engineering to senior leadership
- Manage relationships with external vendors and partners, including cloud providers and tooling vendors
- Lead, coach, and inspire a multidisciplinary organization of engineers and managers across software, infrastructure, reliability, and developer tooling
- Manage distributed teams across multiple time zones, maintaining alignment and a cohesive culture in a remote-friendly environment
- Recruit top-tier talent and act as a top-notch recruiter yourself; foster professional development, recognize outstanding performance, and address underperformance constructively and in a timely way
Skills
- Experience building, leading, and scaling best-in-class platform and/or developer experience organizations, ideally in a rapidly scaling environment, including leading managers and senior engineers
- 10+ years of real-world experience developing or managing complex engineering systems, with significant time spent owning developer experience, platform engineering, or the build/test/release pipeline end to end
- A proven track record of driving developer experience and developer productivity across an organization — you can point to concrete before/after outcomes (build times, PR cycle time, deployment frequency, reliability) from initiatives you led
- Direct, hands-on experience with AI-assisted and agentic development — AI coding harnesses, agent-first / AI-first workflows, and coding agents — and clear, well-formed opinions about how they change code review, testing, pipeline design, and engineering org structure
- Deep expertise with CI/CD systems (Buildkite, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or similar) and a demonstrated ability to scale them, ideally in a monorepo at scale
- Strong software engineering fundamentals — you design well-architected systems and lead from the front, not just from the org chart
- Production experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP), containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes), and infrastructure as code (Terraform / OpenTofu)
- A track record tackling large-scale infrastructure in support of fast-paced ML/AI-enabled products and services
- Strong sense of shared ownership, a collaborative disposition, and excellent written and verbal communication skills
- Experience designing tooling and patterns that work across multiple clouds or isolated / air-gapped and compliance-constrained environments (FedRAMP, SOC 2, or similar) is a strong plus
Benefits
- Flexible Time Off: Altana operates with a Flexible Time Off (FTO) policy that gives you agency over your own time off so you can maximize your work-life balance.
- Parental Leave: We offer industry leading Paid Parental Leave (PPL), providing 14 weeks of leave for non-birthing, adoptive, and foster parents and up to 26 weeks of leave for birthing parents, all paid at 100% of your base salary.
- Health Benefits: We have a full suite of medical, vision, and dental benefits with generous employer contributions, designed to give you flexibility and choice for your individual health situation. Our high deductible health plan is 100% employer paid for employees and supplemented with an employer contribution to your Health Savings Account (HSA). There is also a Flexible Spending Account (FSA) option.
- Supplemental Benefits: Altana provides life, short- and long-term disability, and AD&D insurance coverage, all at no cost to you, so you know that you and your loved ones are covered in case of an emergency.
- 401(k) Savings: Save for and invest in your future using our Guideline 401(k) retirement savings program.
- Commuter Benefits: Save money on your commute by setting aside pre-tax funds for public transit or parking!
- Wellness: Because we value mental and emotional health, every Altana employee has access to a free premium subscription to Calm, the #1 app for meditation, sleep, and mindfulness.
- Pet Insurance: Pets are family too! Keep them healthy with Wishbone insurance and/or our Total Pet vet service and telehealth discount plan.
- Employee Assistance Program: Free access to confidential personal support.
- Dependent Care FSA: You will have access to a Dependent Care FSA, which allows you to set aside pre-tax funds for childcare expenses.
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