Senior Director, Platform Engineering

About the role

The Senior Director of Platform Engineering at Altana will lead the foundational technology that supports all of Altana's engineering efforts. This includes overseeing cloud infrastructure, developer experience, site reliability, and devsecops/release engineering. The role requires a deep understanding of AI-assisted and agentic development, as well as a proven track record of driving developer productivity and reliability.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute a multi-year technical strategy for Platform Engineering, focusing on the most impactful work and long-term architectural goals.

• Design, manage, and secure multi-cloud infrastructure, including data platforms for large-scale data processing, analytics, and machine learning.

• Own the infrastructure and tooling for the engineering organization, including the monorepo, CI/CD platform, build systems, local development environments, and internal tooling.

• Lead build-vs-buy and platform investment decisions, choosing the right tools, vendors, and open-source technologies for the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).

• Drive Developer Acceleration by instrumenting and improving developer workflows, measuring improvements in build times, PR cycle time, flaky-test rate, and deployment frequency.

• Establish AI-first, agent-first development practices, integrating AI-assisted and agent-generated code into CI/CD, code review, local development, and release pipelines at scale.

• Ensure operational excellence by establishing best practices for monitoring, incident response, automation, and performance optimization.

• Collaborate across product, engineering, security, data science, and commercial teams to align platform investments with business objectives.

• Manage relationships with external vendors and partners, including cloud providers and tooling vendors.

• Lead, coach, and inspire a multidisciplinary team of engineers and managers, fostering a culture of shared ownership, resilience, and accountability.

Requirements

• Experience building, leading, and scaling platform and/or developer experience organizations, preferably in a rapidly growing environment.

• Significant experience developing or managing complex engineering systems, with a focus on developer experience and platform engineering.

• Direct, hands-on experience with AI-assisted and agentic development, including AI coding harnesses, agent-first workflows, and coding agents.

• Strong software engineering fundamentals, including design of well-architected systems and leading from the front.

• Production experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP), containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes), and infrastructure as code (Terraform/OpenTofu).

• Experience designing tooling and patterns that work across multiple clouds or isolated/compliance-constrained environments.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of real-world experience developing or managing complex engineering systems.

• A proven track record of driving developer experience and productivity across an organization, evidenced by concrete before/after outcomes.

• Deep expertise with CI/CD systems (Buildkite, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, etc.) and a demonstrated ability to scale them, especially in a monorepo at scale.

• Strong sense of shared ownership, a collaborative disposition, and excellent written and verbal communication skills.

Skills

• AI-assisted and agentic development

• CI/CD systems

• Cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP)

• Containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)

• Infrastructure as code (Terraform/OpenTofu)

Benefits

• Salary Range: $295,000 - $345,000 USD

• Competitive equity grants

• Discretionary bonus or variable compensation plan

• Top-tier benefits including:

  • Flexible Time Off

  • Paid Parental Leave

  • Health Benefits

  • Supplemental Benefits

  • 401(k) Savings

  • Commuter Benefits

  • Wellness Programs

  • Pet Insurance

  • Dependent Care FSA