Director, Platform Engineering

Director, Platform Engineering - Financial Services

Location: Chicago, IL

We are seeking a Director of Platform Engineering to lead a team of approximately 7–10 engineers and managers focused on SRE, observability, reliability, and cloud platform engineering . This leader will be responsible for developing the team, driving technical strategy, improving platform reliability and performance, and partnering with architecture and engineering leadership in a highly regulated financial-services environment.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor, and develop a team of SREs and engineering managers , including hiring, performance management, and career development.
• Drive SRE and observability maturity across a large-scale cloud platform.
• Establish and govern SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, incident response, postmortems, and reliability metrics .
• Lead initiatives around platform reliability, cloud efficiency, performance optimization, and reduction of engineering toil .
• Define observability strategy and roadmap across metrics, logging, tracing, dashboards, and alerting .
• Champion Infrastructure as Code, automation, golden paths, and standardized platform engineering practices .
• Partner with architecture and engineering teams on highly available, scalable, and secure cloud infrastructure.
• Drive engineering performance through DORA metrics and data-driven decision making .
• Ensure platform practices meet security, audit, regulatory, and compliance requirements within a financial-services environment.

Key Technical Skills

• SRE / Observability
• AWS / Cloud Platform Engineering
• Kubernetes / EKS
• Kafka
• Terraform / Infrastructure as Code
• Jenkins / CI/CD
• Puppet, Chef, or Ansible
• Prometheus / PromQL
• Metrics platforms such as Mimir, Thanos, VictoriaMetrics, or Amazon Managed Prometheus
• Distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry, Tempo, or Jaeger
• Logging platforms including Loki, Elastic, or Splunk
• Strong understanding of SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, incident management, and reliability engineering
• Experience with highly available 24x7 mission-critical environments

Ideal Background

• 10+ years of progressive hands-on software/infrastructure engineering experience.
• 5+ years leading engineering teams .
• Strong history of building and maturing SRE and observability practices at scale .
• Proven people-management experience leading engineers and managers .
• Experience in financial services or another highly regulated environment strongly preferred.
• Strong technical leadership and communication skills, with the ability to operate at both the strategic and hands-on levels.

Recruiting focus: The strongest candidates will likely be Director/Sr. Manager-level SRE, Platform Engineering, Infrastructure Engineering, or Observability leaders who have managed both engineers and managers while still possessing deep technical knowledge of AWS, Kubernetes, observability, Prometheus/PromQL, Terraform, and modern SRE practices .