Engineering Leader, Platform Engineering

What You'll Do

• Lead a multi-team Platform org
• Own Platform's company-level objectives and the engineering plan that delivers them.
• Translate company priorities and product-engineering needs into a platform roadmap, in a way that flows both up and down.
• Be responsible for build-vs-buy and architecture-level trade-offs across infrastructure, data, developer experience, and AI tooling; own the technical roadmap and how it balances against the needs of your customers.
• Represent Platform and collaborate with cross-functional leadership partners and in engineering-wide leadership conversations.
• Develop the engineering managers reporting to you
• Coach EMs to a higher bar with clear feedback, growth plans, and direct support.
• Drive AI-native development in line with ClassDojo’s engineering practices (flow-based delivery, vertical slicing, WIP discipline, Definition of Done, observability)
• Address performance issues early and clearly; develop managers out of "fine" performance into great performance.
• Be directive when our values, quality bar, or ways of working are at stake.
• Treat the product engineering areas as customers: understand their needs, measure adoption and satisfaction, and prioritize accordingly.
• Build paved roads and golden paths that teams want to use; earn adoption rather than mandate it.
• Drive technical excellence across the platform
• Support and drive architecture and systems design decisions across infrastructure, data, DevEx, and AI tooling; ensure systems are reliable, maintainable, and operationally ready.
• Make build-vs-buy calls deliberately; avoid both not-invented-here and unmanaged sprawl.
• Partner cross-functionally
• Co-own the platform roadmap and quality bar with the product engineering leads who depend on you.
• Build pragmatic interim solutions that work today and migrate cleanly as platform capabilities mature.

Who You Are

• 2+ years managing managers, with direct reports who were themselves people managers.
• 10+ years total in technical roles, with a strong individual-contributor era you can still draw on.
• Have owned a platform, infrastructure, data, or developer-productivity area and delivered a measurable outcome (throughput, reliability, cost, or operational safety).
• Have built or evolved platform engineering practices across multiple teams, not just within one, and earned adoption.
• Hire, develop, and manage engineering managers.
• Comfortable making and defending build-vs-buy and architecture-level trade-offs across the platform surface; can still reason about code with taste.
• Embrace Candor > Harmony: give the hard message early, comfortable with disagreement.
• Use LLM-based tools daily and push your teams to adopt them.
• Are an excellent written communicator; can articulate strategy and trade-offs clearly in writing.

Nice to Have

• Experience running infrastructure, data, DevEx, or AI platforms at meaningful scale.
• Built developer platforms that internal engineers genuinely adopted (paved roads, golden paths, internal developer platforms).
• Used AI-native workflows to materially change how a team designs, ships, and operates, and/or built AI tooling/platform for other engineers (not just personal use).
• Experience leading a remote-first, distributed engineering team.
• Bridges a network of high-quality platform/infrastructure engineering talent.