Director, Platform Engineering & Quality

About the Role

We are looking for a leader to elevate engineering quality and platform reliability as Spotnana continues to scale. This role will shape the strategy, processes, and teams responsible for enabling high-quality product delivery while building a resilient platform foundation that supports every engineering team across the company.

Day-to-day Responsibilities

• Quality Engineering
  • Lead and grow a world-class functional QA team, establishing and continuously improving testing practices across the organization
  • Own defect prevention end-to-end — from PRD ingestion to production release — ensuring new features ship with high confidence
  • Partner closely with product and engineering teams to translate complex product requirements into comprehensive, risk-based test plans with full feature coverage
  • Drive the adoption of internal automation tooling and TestRail to scale QA coverage without scaling headcount linearly
  • Define and track quality metrics — defect containment, escape, and rejection rates — using data to continuously raise the bar
  • Champion a shift-left testing culture, embedding quality early in the development lifecycle rather than as a gate at the end
• Platform Engineering
  • Own and evolve Spotnana's shared platform infrastructure — including Temporal, Cassandra, Kafka, RDS, and adjacent services — that all product pods depend on
  • Build and lead a platform team that operates as a core horizontal function, enabling every product pod to focus on feature development without worrying about platform reliability, scalability, or maintenance
  • Define SLOs and reliability standards for shared platform components and drive continuous improvement against them
  • Partner with infrastructure, DevOps, and product engineering leads to architect the right operating model for platform ownership across the org
  • Serve as a technical thought leader and escalation point for platform incidents and architecture decisions
• Leadership & Cross-Functional Impact
  • Recruit, develop, and retain top engineering talent across both QA and platform functions
  • Manage vendor relationships and tooling contracts relevant to your domain
  • Serve as a standard-bearer for engineering discipline: CI/CD best practices, QMS frameworks, and operational excellence
  • Drive a culture of transparency and continuous improvement through rigorous RCA processes, incident reviews, and blameless post-mortems

Qualifications & Skills

• Proven track record leading both quality engineering and platform/infrastructure teams at scale
• Deep expertise in modern test automation strategies, frameworks (e.g. Selenium, Playwright, Cypress), and QA tooling (e.g. TestRail, Allure)
• Hands-on experience with distributed systems and the shared infrastructure components that underpin large-scale SaaS platforms — including workflow orchestration (Temporal), messaging (Kafka), and databases (Cassandra, PostgreSQL/RDS)
• Strong command of cloud platforms (AWS preferred), Kubernetes, and infrastructure-as-code principles
• Experience defining quality metrics, defect lifecycle management, and driving data-informed QA process improvements
• Demonstrated ability to operate as a horizontal enablement function — influencing without direct authority across multiple product teams
• Excellent communication skills; able to translate between technical detail and executive narrative
• Familiarity with agile software development environments and tools like Jira and Confluence

Benefits

• Pre-tax and ROTH 401(k) options via Fidelity with up to a 4% company match
• Comprehensive benefit plans covering medical, dental, vision, life, and disability effective on your hire date. We cover 100% of your employee premiums and 85% of your eligible dependents
• Pre-tax flexible spending account options for health, dependent care and commuter expenses
• Flexible PTO in addition to 10 company holidays and an end-of-year company shutdown
• Up to 26 weeks of parental leave
• Monthly cell phone/internet stipend
• Extra perks — IATAN travel membership, pet insurance, financial wellness tools, Calm app access, and more

Pay & Location

Location: Palo Alto, CA – required in office 1+ days per week.

Base salary range: $210,000 - $280,000 per year, depending on factors including the candidate's working location. Total compensation also includes cash, annual performance bonus, and company equity.