A large global financial technology and enterprise software organization is seeking a Senior Director of Engineering to lead and evolve its Platform Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering, cloud infrastructure, and observability capabilities.
This is a senior leadership position for an engineering executive who can establish long-term organizational and technology strategy while maintaining deep technical credibility across software engineering and modern infrastructure.
The successful candidate will initially lead an organization of approximately 50 75 engineers, with significant potential for expansion. The mandate includes transforming traditional infrastructure capabilities into a product-oriented internal platform, modernizing cloud-native systems, improving developer experience, strengthening reliability, and establishing scalable engineering practices.
This is not a pure people-management role. The organization needs a leader who remains close to architecture and engineering decisions and can still write or meaningfully review production-quality code, particularly Python.
RESPONSIBILITIES- Lead and scale Platform Engineering, SRE, cloud infrastructure, and observability organizations.
- Provide leadership to an initial organization of approximately 50 75 engineers.
- Build the organizational structure and leadership capabilities required to support significant future growth.
- Develop Directors, Engineering Managers, technical leaders, and senior individual contributors.
- Define the long-term platform, infrastructure, reliability, and cloud-native strategy.
- Transform traditional infrastructure functions into a modern Platform Engineering organization.
- Build and evolve internal developer platforms using a platform-as-a-product approach.
- Establish internal platforms with defined users, product roadmaps, adoption goals, service standards, and measurable outcomes.
- Create reusable and self-service infrastructure capabilities that reduce friction for application-development teams.
- Drive modernization across Kubernetes, containers, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and Infrastructure-as-Code.
- Improve deployment automation, production reliability, operational scalability, and developer productivity.
- Establish mature SRE practices, observability standards, reliability metrics, and production-accountability models.
- Improve developer experience across application, product, and software-engineering teams.
- Identify and remove infrastructure and delivery bottlenecks affecting engineering velocity.
- Review complex platform architecture, technical designs, and production code.
- Remain technically credible and engaged, including through Python code and design reviews.
- Partner with security and architecture teams on infrastructure standards and policy automation.
- Evaluate and introduce AI-assisted developer tooling and Agentic AI workflows.
- Apply AI and automation to platform engineering, infrastructure management, operational workflows, and developer enablement.
- Partner directly with the CTO and other senior engineering and product leaders.
- Communicate platform strategy, investments, risks, architecture decisions, and measurable outcomes to executive stakeholders.
- Balance long-term transformation with the practical reliability and scalability needs of production systems.
Role Requirements:- 10+ years of experience across Platform Engineering, SRE, cloud infrastructure, or related disciplines.
- Demonstrated experience leading large engineering organizations.
- Experience managing organizations of approximately 50 or more engineers through multiple managers or directors.
- Strong software-engineering background.
- Recent hands-on Python engineering experience.
- Ability to write or meaningfully review production-quality code.
- Deep Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure expertise.
- Strong container and distributed-systems experience.
- Experience leading Platform Engineering and SRE organizations.
- Strong observability and reliability-engineering experience.
- Experience establishing SRE practices and measurable reliability standards.
- Experience building internal developer platforms.
- Demonstrated platform-as-a-product experience.
- Infrastructure-as-Code expertise.
- Experience creating reusable, automated, self-service infrastructure.
- Experience improving developer productivity and software-delivery velocity.
- Track record leading significant platform, infrastructure, or cloud modernization.
- Experience transforming traditional infrastructure functions into modern engineering organizations.
- Strong organizational-design, talent-development, and succession-planning capabilities.
- Ability to combine executive leadership with hands-on technical involvement.
- Strong executive communication and stakeholder-management skills.
- Ability to partner credibly with a CTO and senior technology leadership.
PREFERRED EXPERIENCE- Claude or comparable AI developer tooling.
- Agentic AI workflows.
- AI-enabled infrastructure or operational automation.
- OpenStack and/or VMware.
- Go, Rust, Java, or Node.Js.
- Policy-as-Code.
- Developer Experience or DevEx programs.
- Experience scaling engineering organizations through rapid growth.
- Experience leading globally distributed teams.
- Financial technology or enterprise-software experience.