Director of Engineering - Data Platform

What You'll Work On

• Lead a distributed engineering team across platform/product engineering, connectors, QA, DevOps/infra, AI implementation, data governance, and support.
• Own delivery, quality, release discipline, and execution of the technical roadmap.
• Install engineering discipline where it's thin: automated testing, QA, CI/CD, release governance, and versioning.
• Drive repeatable, perimeter-safe deployments, including containerization, infrastructure-as-code, secure deployment, and SOC 2 readiness.
• Partner with the Chief Architect on the connector framework, canonical metadata model, architecture decisions, and product IP.
• Build the team: assess current talent, retain the strong, hire the gaps, and align the team plan to the roadmap.
• Push practical AI use across coding, review, testing, ops, and engineering productivity.

What You'll Bring

• Engineering leadership experience; you have run and grown teams, managed engineers, owned delivery, and shipped real product.
• Hands-on technical depth in data platforms, metadata, backend systems, or platform engineering; enough to earn the respect of strong engineers.
• Experience building or rebuilding an engineering function from the ground up, especially in a startup or early-stage environment.
• Experience installing testing, QA, CI/CD, release process, or quality practices where they did not already exist.
• Experience leading distributed or offshore engineering teams across time zones.
• Security and compliance literacy for regulated buyers, including SOC 2, audit logging, SSO, data security, or secure deployment.
• Strong AI fluency, with concrete examples of how you use AI in your own work and across engineering teams.

How You Work

• You are a player-coach: technical enough to go deep, practical enough to ship, and comfortable getting into the work when needed.
• You operate with incomplete information and define the path when there is not one.
• You bring order without slowing momentum; you raise the floor on quality, process, and security while keeping the team building.

Bonus Points If You Have

• Experience taking an early-stage product to enterprise-grade maturity.
• Background in regulated industries such as financial services, insurance, healthcare, or government.
• Familiarity with perimeter/on-prem deployment, lineage, metadata, graph data, or migration impact-analysis problems.

What Success Looks Like

• The team has clear ownership, a stronger delivery rhythm, and a credible roadmap-to-release model.
• Testing, QA, CI/CD, release governance, and versioning are in place without slowing product momentum.
• The product is moving toward enterprise-grade readiness for regulated buyers.
• You are a trusted partner to the Chief Architect and a credible leader for engineers, product stakeholders, and executives.

Why Join FormativGroup

• We are practical, collaborative, and focused on solving meaningful business and technology problems.
• We are specialists who help the middle market take full advantage of their technology investments with deep, industry-centric expertise, all in one place, to unify fragmented systems.
• We bridge the gap between business goals and modern platforms.
• We are an equal opportunity employer providing opportunities to applicants and employees without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or protected veteran status.