Director of Platform Engineering
Position Summary
Grand Circle Corporation is the leader in international travel, adventure, and discovery for Americans aged 50+. Headquartered in Boston, MA, we're a global enterprise with more than 30 regional offices and over 2,000 associates worldwide. Since our founding, more than two million Americans have traveled with our award-winning travel brands: Grand Circle Travel, Overseas Adventure Travel, and Grand Circle Cruise Lines. We are excited to continue maturing our creative and technical engineering teams to support our growing and evolving digital ecosystem. We are seeking a Director of Platform Engineering to play a critical leadership role in driving technical transformation across our platform and engineering capabilities.
What You'll Do
Lead, coach, and develop leaders across multiple engineering teams, helping them grow and effectively support their own teams.
Build high-performing teams through mentorship, feedback, career planning, and leadership development.
Define development goals and create long-term growth strategies for engineering organizations.
Foster a culture of innovation, accountability, collaboration, and continuous learning.
Establish and execute the technology roadmap supporting Platform Engineering initiatives.
Drive adoption of modern engineering practices and emerging technologies, including AI-enabled workflows and automation.
Lead teams responsible for platform components and services leveraging technologies such as React, Next.js, C#, Docker, Redis, SQL Server, Web APIs, Azure, and AI platforms.
Provide technical leadership across the full software lifecycle—from architecture and development through deployment and ongoing operations.
Guide teams toward building scalable, secure, high-performing, and reusable solutions.
Lead initiatives exploring and implementing AI-driven engineering capabilities including automation, search, chatbots, and productivity enhancements.
Continuously challenge existing approaches and encourage teams to rethink processes and technologies.
Evaluate and partner with third-party vendors and technology providers to support strategic goals.
Establish metrics and operational visibility to ensure systems reliability and performance.
Partner with stakeholders and leaders across the organization to align engineering priorities with business goals.
Support ongoing agile process improvements and delivery practices.
Oversee system performance, uptime, security, and compliance requirements including PCI and GDPR standards.
Balance speed, risk, quality, and sustainable delivery practices across initiatives.
Qualifications
Experience & Leadership: 10+ years of software engineering experience with at least 2+ years managing managers and leading multiple teams. Experience building, scaling, and evolving engineering organizations. Proven experience mentoring leaders and coaching engineering talent at multiple levels.
Technical Expertise: Experience designing scalable, secure, and maintainable cloud-native solutions. Strong understanding of Domain-Driven Design (DDD), SOLID principles, and software design patterns. Experience evaluating and implementing AI-enabled technologies and workflow improvements. Experience with Azure or similar cloud platforms. Familiarity with modern engineering technologies and environments including APIs, DevSecOps, databases, containers, and platform architectures.
Collaboration & Ways of Working: Strong communication and stakeholder management skills with the ability to influence without direct authority. Experience evaluating and partnering with external vendors and technology partners. Agile/Scrum experience in fast-paced environments. Demonstrated adaptability and curiosity with emerging technologies.
Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, related discipline, or equivalent experience.