Director of Engineering - Data Platform

FormativGroup•Austin, TX

22h•Remote

About The Position

FormativGroup is seeking a Director of Engineering to lead and grow the engineering organization for an early-stage data platform designed for regulated enterprises. This role involves owning the delivery, quality, security readiness, engineering process, and roadmap execution of a working product that is becoming a standalone business. The Director will partner closely with the Chief Architect and manage a distributed team, bringing order and establishing engineering discipline.

Requirements

Engineering leadership experience; you have run and grown teams, managed engineers, owned delivery, and shipped real product.
Hands-on technical depth in data platforms, metadata, backend systems, or platform engineering; enough to earn the respect of strong engineers.
Experience building or rebuilding an engineering function from the ground up, especially in a startup or early-stage environment.
Experience installing testing, QA, CI/CD, release process, or quality practices where they did not already exist.
Experience leading distributed or offshore engineering teams across time zones.
Security and compliance literacy for regulated buyers, including SOC 2, audit logging, SSO, data security, or secure deployment.
Strong AI fluency, with concrete examples of how you use AI in your own work and across engineering teams.
Applicants must be authorized to work for ANY employer in the U.S.
Candidates must reside in one of the following U.S. states: AL, AR, AZ, CA, CO, CT, DE, FL, GA, IA, ID, IL, IN, KS, MA, MD, MI, MN, MO, NC, NH, NJ, NV, NY, OH, OK, OR, PA, TN, TX, VA, WI, and Washington DC.

Nice To Haves

Experience taking an early-stage product to enterprise-grade maturity.
Background in regulated industries such as financial services, insurance, healthcare, or government.
Familiarity with perimeter/on-prem deployment, lineage, metadata, graph data, or migration impact-analysis problems.

Responsibilities

Lead a distributed engineering team across platform/product engineering, connectors, QA, DevOps/infra, AI implementation, data governance, and support.
Own delivery, quality, release discipline, and execution of the technical roadmap.
Install engineering discipline where it's thin: automated testing, QA, CI/CD, release governance, and versioning.
Drive repeatable, perimeter-safe deployments, including containerization, infrastructure-as-code, secure deployment, and SOC 2 readiness.
Partner with the Chief Architect on the connector framework, canonical metadata model, architecture decisions, and product IP.
Build the team: assess current talent, retain the strong, hire the gaps, and align the team plan to the roadmap.
Push practical AI use across coding, review, testing, ops, and engineering productivity.