Director, Platform Development

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and implementation of core backend services and data platform components using Node.js and TypeScript
• Establish and evolve platform architecture, design patterns, and engineering standards
• Own and triage intake requests, balancing short-term delivery with long-term platform health
• Partner closely with governance, analytics, and downstream consumers to ensure the platform supports:
• Scalable data ingestion and access patterns
• Lakehouse-style architectures
• ELT pipelines
• Data governance, metadata, and lineage requirements
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines that enable safe, repeatable, and observable deployments
• Set expectations and best practices around:
• Object-oriented design and proven design patterns
• Test-driven development (TDD) and strong automated test coverage
• Secure development lifecycle (SDL) principles
• Hire, mentor, and manage engineers as the team grows
• Conduct code and design reviews, providing clear technical guidance
• Collaborate effectively in a matrixed enterprise environment with both legacy systems and modern platforms
• Gradually transition from primary IC to people and execution leadership as the platform matures

Qualifications

• Deep foundation in software engineering fundamentals, including:
• Object-oriented programming
• Design patterns
• API and service design
• Solid understanding of data engineering concepts, including:
• Lakehouse architectures
• ELT pipelines
• Data governance, metadata, and lineage
• Experience building modular or microservice-based systems
• Demonstrated experience leading or mentoring engineers (formal people management experience preferred, but not required)
• Strong commitment to code quality, testing, and automation
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines and modern DevOps practices
• Comfortable operating with a high degree of ownership in a lean, fast-moving environment
• Strong communicator who can translate between technical and non-technical stakeholders

Nice to Have

• Experience with ML platforms or services (e.g., Databricks, AWS Bedrock)
• Familiarity with analytics and BI tools (Tableau, Power BI, or similar)
• Experience working in media, streaming, or large-scale enterprise environments
• Prior experience modernizing or integrating legacy systems into cloud-native platforms