Director, Engineering Operations

TKO•Austin, TX

5d•$150,000 - $200,000•Hybrid

About The Position

The Director, Engineering Operations (Core) is a senior technology leader accountable for the operational excellence, reliability, and efficiency of Core platforms. You will lead run-the-business (RTB) operations, incident and change management, release governance, and quality guardrails. You'll partner closely with Technical Product, Business Operations, Security & Compliance, and Platform Services teams as well as with the Director, Solutions Architecture and Delivery (Core). You will drive AI adoption to streamline processes and outputs, establish comprehensive observability across applications and infrastructure, and ensure 24/7 reliability and availability during major event windows with elevated risk and traffic.

Requirements

10+ years in software engineering operations, site reliability engineering, platform or DevOps leadership supporting 24x7 systems
Experience leading and improving team performance measuring against DORA metrics
Proven track record leading incident response and postmortems, with measurable reductions in MTTD, MTTI, and MTTR and decreases in MTBF
Hands-on experience implementing observability and SLO/SLI frameworks
Strong background with CI/CD, trunk-based development, automated testing strategies, and release orchestration
Security-by-design mindset, experience with IRP/SIRP operations and DevSecOps practices
Excellent stakeholder management; effective and concise communication skills with both technical and non-technical audiences
Ability to lead and execute through ambiguity and high-demand, high-stakes events

Nice To Haves

Experience with Datadog, feature flagging platforms, and progressive delivery
History of operating platforms supporting large-scale events, ticketing, payments, or high-traffic commerce
Experience applying AI in technical operations and/or software delivery
Background in capacity planning, performance engineering, and chaos testing
Familiarity with regulated environments and audit processes; comfortable publishing operational evidence and controls
Experience shaping org-level SDLC, STLC, and SSDLC standards across internal and partner teams

Responsibilities

Own end-to-end engineering operations across RTB: intake, triage, prioritization, change/release governance, incident response, and post-mortems
Drive AI-enabled operational efficiency and automation across the SDLC, STLC, and SSDLC
Establish comprehensive observability with golden signals, SLIs/SLOs, anomaly detection, auto-remediation, and cost/capacity insights
Define and uphold SLOs for critical domains and guest journeys (checkout, inventory sync, fulfillment, payments)
Standardize Datadog logs, metrics, traces, and RUM/synthetics to accelerate detection and root-cause analysis
Continuously measure and improve delivery performance through DORA metrics
Enforce release discipline: balanced planned vs. unplanned releases, readiness criteria, rollback playbooks, and event blackout windows
Support major events with elevated operational rigor: dry runs, performance testing, strict change controls, enhanced monitoring, and clear comms protocols
Partner with Business Operations, Technical Product, and Solutions Architecture to maintain a single, aligned view of priorities, dependencies, and SLAs
Lead post-event and incident post-mortems to drive continuous improvement of SOPs, runbooks, response protocols, and reliability
Mature incident and security response in close partnership with TechOps and Security & Compliance (IRP/SIRP)
Continuously reduce technical debt across performance, security, and maintainability
Foster learning, blameless culture with KPI/OKR-driven improvements and transparent communication
Publish clear weekly and monthly operational health and stability reporting