Head of Platform Engineering - Control Plane

About the role

The Head of Platform Engineering – Control Plane will lead the development and implementation of our platform control plane initiatives, including governance layer as a code and all control functions directing our execution plan. This role involves building and scaling a highly flexible, scalable, governed execution plane.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate closely with cross-functional teams, stakeholders, and technology partners to develop and integrate automation solutions that drive business growth, improve customer experiences, and reduce operational costs.
• Own the roadmap and delivery for control plane capabilities such as identity and access management, tenant boundaries, policy enforcement, approvals, evaluation gates, observability, auditability, FinOps, secrets management, and lifecycle/promotion workflows.
• Lead platform, infrastructure, developer platform, AI/ML platform, security platform, or other reusable enterprise engineering capabilities.
• Show deep hands-on technical background in designing, building, and operating distributed, cloud-native platform services in production.
• Show strong understanding of enterprise governance, security, risk, compliance, and operational controls required to safely run AI or data-intensive systems in production.
• Show proven ability to drive engineering excellence through architecture reviews, design standards, testing, CI/CD, observability, incident response, reliability practices, and operational metrics.
• Show strong communication and influence skills, with the ability to simplify complex technical topics for senior stakeholders and align teams around platform standards.
• Show high ownership mindset with a bias for durable, reusable platform capabilities over one-off solutions.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science, engineering, management or a related field.
• Strong people leadership experience managing software engineering teams, including hiring, coaching, performance management, and developing senior technical talent.
• Deep hands-on technical background designing, building, and operating distributed, cloud-native platform services in production.
• Experience leading platform, infrastructure, developer platform, AI/ML platform, security platform, or other reusable enterprise engineering capabilities.
• Experience with AWS-based platform engineering, including services such as Bedrock, SageMaker, Lambda, DynamoDB, API Gateway, EKS, IAM, CloudWatch, and related DevOps tooling.
• Experience designing or operating multi-tenant platforms with RBAC/ABAC, entitlement models, service accounts, policy-as-code, and secure cross-account or cross-environment access patterns.
• Knowledge of observability, tracing, telemetry, cost attribution, and platform-level operational dashboards for enterprise-scale systems.
• Experience establishing developer-friendly paved roads, reference architectures, templates, SDKs, CLI tools, or self-service workflows that improve adoption and reduce support burden.
• Experience working in regulated environments where security, compliance, data residency, retention, and auditability are first-class platform requirements.
• Experience with vendor integration strategies that preserve portability and avoid lock-in through stable platform interfaces and clear architectural contracts.
• Comfort operating in a matrixed, global organization with onshore/offshore teams, multiple stakeholders, and evolving platform priorities.

Qualifications

• Experience with agentic AI systems, LLM platforms, model gateways, tool/action gateways, agent registries, evaluation frameworks, or AI developer tooling.
• Familiarity with AI governance patterns such as prompt-injection defense, PII handling, output filtering, risk tiering, model/tool allow-lists, HITL controls, and audit trails.
• Experience with MLOps, LLMOps, AIOps, model lifecycle management, or production AI operations.
• Experience with vendor integration strategies that preserve portability and avoid lock-in through stable platform interfaces and clear architectural contracts.
• Background in MLOps, LLMOps, AIOps, model lifecycle management, or production AI operations.
• Comfort operating in a matrixed, global organization with onshore/offshore teams, multiple stakeholders, and evolving platform priorities.

Skills

• Strong people leadership experience managing software engineering teams.
• Deep hands-on technical background designing, building, and operating distributed, cloud-native platform services in production.
• Experience leading platform, infrastructure, developer platform, AI/ML platform, security platform, or other reusable enterprise engineering capabilities.
• Experience with AWS-based platform engineering, including services such as Bedrock, SageMaker, Lambda, DynamoDB, API Gateway, EKS, IAM, CloudWatch, and related DevOps tooling.
• Experience designing or operating multi-tenant platforms with RBAC/ABAC, entitlement models, service accounts, policy-as-code, and secure cross-account or cross-environment access patterns.
• Knowledge of observability, tracing, telemetry, cost attribution, and platform-level operational dashboards for enterprise-scale systems.
• Experience establishing developer-friendly paved roads, reference architectures, templates, SDKs, CLI tools, or self-service workflows that improve adoption and reduce support burden.
• Experience working in regulated environments where security, compliance, data residency, retention, and auditability are first-class platform requirements.
• Experience with vendor integration strategies that preserve portability and avoid lock-in through stable platform interfaces and clear architectural contracts.
• Comfort operating in a matrixed, global organization with onshore/offshore teams, multiple stakeholders, and evolving platform priorities.

Benefits

Our benefits package includes:

• Meaningful and challenging work opportunities to accelerate technology and innovation in a secure and compliant way.
• Competitive compensation.
• Excellent medical, dental, supplemental health, life and vision coverage for you and your dependents with no wait period.
• Life and disability insurance.
• A great 401(k) with match.
• Tuition assistance, paid parental leave and backup family care.
• Dynamic, modern work environments that promote collaboration and creativity.
• Flexible time off, dress code, and work location policies to balance your work and life in the ways that suit you best.
• Social responsibility in all aspects of our work.

Pay

$152,290.00 - $250,195.00

Schedule

Full-time

Contact Information

To apply, please visit our careers page at Guardian Life.