Director of Platform Engineering - Emergent Software

**This position is a direct hire for one of our clients. This is a remote position. Eligible candidates must currently reside in the US and authorized to work in the US without visa sponsorship.**

Our client is seeking a leader to build the foundation for an AI‑native engineering future. As Director of Platform Engineering, you’ll shape how their teams design, build, and deliver software—owning the tools, platforms, and standards that power innovation across the organization. This is a high‑impact leadership role at the center of technology, strategy, and transformation. Our ideal candidate is a technical leader who has built platform engineering functions from the ground up, operates at the intersection of infrastructure, developer tooling, and reliability

engineering, and is energized by the transition to AI-native software development. You are equally comfortable writing technical strategy for the board and jumping into a CI/CD pipeline to solve a problem.

Responsibilities

Platform Architecture & Developer Experience

Own the developer experience across tooling, AI integration, CI/CD, and governance

Set platform standards to improve speed, quality, and consistency

Drive adoption of AI‑native SDLC practices and improve engineering velocity

Lead architecture for shared infrastructure, observability, deployment, and APIs

Team Leadership

Build and lead the Platform Engineering team

Develop talent and foster a culture of reliability, automation, and craftsmanship

Represent Platform Engineering across Product, IT, and executive leadership

Partner with engineering leadership on long-term technology strategy

Reliability & Operations

Own platform reliability, including SLOs, on-call, and incident management

Define observability and alerting standards across systems

Align with IT on boundaries between platform, infrastructure, and security

Innovation

Evaluate and implement tools and practices to improve productivity

Drive AI engineering transformation, including AI-assisted development and testing

Advise on platform strategy, architecture, and technical diligence

Requirements

10+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 5 years in platform engineering, DevOps, or SRE leadership roles

Demonstrated experience building or scaling a platform engineering function, from establishing standards through growing a team

Strong command of cloud infrastructure (AWS primary, GCP secondary), CI/CD pipelines, and modern deployment practices

Hands-on experience with observability tooling (DataDog, CloudWatch, PagerDuty, or equivalent)

Experience leading and developing engineering teams — hiring, mentoring, and setting technical direction

Strong communicator who is comfortable translating platform strategy for non-technical audiences and making the case fo