Director Platform Engineering - SRE / Observability

Director, Platform Engineering SALARY: $175k - $240k plus 30% bonus

Keys SRE observability infrastructure kubernetes kafka aws terraform. The Director will lead and manage this team to drive reliability, observability, and cloud platform engineering excellence across a large, complex cloud-based computing environment. The ideal candidate is a hands-on, data-driven technical leader, who can personally raise the bar on SRE and observability practices, reduce waste, optimize cloud efficiency, and improve performance, in close partnership with a dedicated SRE/monitoring team and a centralized architecture function.

Required) 5+ years of demonstrated experience leading engineering teams, with an emphasis on developing key talent and cultivating positive, high-performing cultures (Required) 10+ years of progressive, hands-on experience in software engineering with an understanding of large-scale computing solutions (primarily AWS), including software design and development, database architectures, IP networking, security, cloud operations, and performance tuning (Required) Demonstrated, hands-on expertise building and maturing SRE and observability practices at scale, able to personally raise the technical bar for a dedicated SRE/monitoring team, not just consume their output (Required) Demonstrated track record owning the definition and governance of SLOs and SLAs for mission-critical systems, and personally driving resilience engineering practices (chaos engineering, load/performance testing) to validate reliability ahead of incidents (Required) Demonstrated track record driving reliability through a data-driven culture, waste/toil reduction, cloud efficiency measures, and performance optimization, treating metrics as the primary lens for every decision (Required) Experience defining, instrumenting, and acting on software delivery performance metrics (DORA metrics, cycle time, deployment frequency, lead time, etc.) to drive engineering improvement initiatives (Required) Strong technical team leadership and technical project management skills (Required) Ability to clearly communicate verbally and in writing to business and technology leaders, architects, developers, and team members (Required) Experience acting as a product owner, defining roadmap, requirements, and priorities, for a platform capability such as observability, ideally in partnership with a separate team that owns the underlying tooling and operations (Required) Experience managing work tasks using Agile methodology/scrum desired

Required) Deep expertise in OpenTelemetry, including instrumentation standards, auto-instrumentation, semantic conventions, and the OTel Collector, as the foundation for a vendor-neutral, paved-road instrumentation strategy (Required) Hands-on experience with metrics engines and time-series databases, including Prometheus and PromQL, plus scale-out options such as Mimir, Thanos, VictoriaMetrics, or Amazon Managed Prometheus, including cardinality management (Required) Hands-on experience with tracing and logging backends such as Tempo/Jaeger, Loki/Elastic/Splunk (Splunk is common in financial services), and AWS X-Ray (Required) Experience with alerting and incident tooling such as PagerDuty or Opsgenie, including ServiceNow integration, alert routing, and noise reduction (Required) Experience delivering golden paths and templates (Terraform modules, Helm charts, pipeline templates) that ship with logging, metrics, tracing, dashboards, alerts, and SLO defaults out of the box (Required) Experience with resilience validation practices, including chaos engineering (e.g., AWS FIS, Gremlin) and load/performance testing (Required) Fluency in the Golden Signals, RED, and USE methods as applied frameworks for monitoring and alerting design (Terraform, Kubernetes, Jenkins or other CI/CD tooling, Kafka, Github, and configuration management tools such as Puppet, Chef, or Ansible (Terraform, CloudFormation, CDK, Pulumi), with a track record of driving IaC adoption at scale across a cloud platform organization (Required) Relevant experience with configuration and implementation of IaaS, Infrastructure as Code, AWS, Azure, etc. (Required) Expert working knowledge of infrastructure design and components, such as servers, operating systems, networks, and storage (Agile/Lean background for projects and project delivery (Required) Bachelor's degree, preferably in a technical discipline (Computer Science, Mathematics, etc.), Required) 10+ years' experience in IT systems installation, operations, administration, and maintenance of cloud systems / virtualized servers, including 5+ years in a technical leadership role

(Required) AWS Solutions Architect Associate Certification or higher strongly desired