Director of Platform Engineering

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Nebraska•Omaha, NE

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

At Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Nebraska, we are a mission-driven organization dedicated to championing the health and well-being of our members and the communities we serve. Our team is the power behind that promise. And, as the industry rapidly evolves and we seek ways to optimize business processes and customer experiences, there’s no greater time for forward-thinking professionals like you to join us in delivering on it! As a member of Team Blue, you’ll find purpose, opportunities and the support you need to build a meaningful career and make a powerful impact in our community. The Director of Platform Engineering defines and drives the enterprise platform strategy — then makes it real. Every engineering team at BCBSNE — whether they're building claims processing, member portals, or AI-driven workflows — depends on a shared platform to ship reliably. That platform doesn't fully exist yet. You build it. You design the standards, publish the pipelines, maintain the modules, and create the self-service experience that lets application, data, and infrastructure teams deliver quickly, securely, and consistently — on one seamless surface, not three. You manage delivery partners across time zones and hold each to the same bar as your own team. And when something breaks, stalls, or drifts, you don't escalate — you own it, fix it, and make sure it doesn't happen forward. The ideal candidate will live within driving distance of the Omaha, Nebraska office. This position allows remote flexibility but will have 3 days per week in the office.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field — or equivalent hands-on experience that speaks for itself.
8+ years in engineering, platform, cloud, or infrastructure roles, with at least 3 years leading engineers and shipping through them.
You've built and led teams that own enterprise-scale platforms or shared services — not just contributed to them.
Deep, working knowledge of cloud infrastructure (Azure preferred), DevOps toolchains, Agile delivery, and modern CI/CD practices — applied daily, not just on a resume.
You've managed vendor partnerships across onshore, nearshore, and offshore models — and held each to the same delivery and quality standard as your own team.

Nice To Haves

You've operated platforms in regulated environments (healthcare, financial services, insurance) — where compliance isn't optional and audit readiness is constant.
Your experience spans software delivery, data platforms, and infrastructure operations — you see the full stack, not just your slice.
You apply SRE principles in practice: error budgets, toil reduction, blameless postmortems, and operational excellence as a habit rather than a framework on a shelf.

Responsibilities

Define the platform engineering strategy and keep it locked to business goals and the IS direction — then translate it into a prioritized roadmap with measurable outcomes, not aspirations.
Own the platform backlog in partnership with peer directors; ensure every quarter's work maps to enterprise priorities and downstream delivery needs.
Build, lead, and mentor a high-performing platform engineering team that defaults to ownership, ships reliably, and improves continuously.
Champion DevOps, Agile, and platform-as-a-product practices — model the behavior, don't just mandate it.
Design and deliver scalable, secure, reusable platform capabilities: cloud foundations, CI/CD, developer tooling, observability, and security automation.
Establish architectural patterns, standards, and guardrails that give teams autonomy inside governance — not governance instead of autonomy.
Ensure platform services let software, data, and product teams ship solutions quickly and consistently without reinventing infrastructure.
Own platform reliability, availability, and performance across the enterprise — measure it, report it, improve it.
Run incident management, root cause analysis, and continuous improvement for every platform service you deliver.
Drive integration across software delivery, data operations, infrastructure, and security — no seams visible to consuming teams.
Track delivery and operational metrics; use them to find friction and eliminate it, not just to report status.
Engage enterprise stakeholders to map upstream/downstream dependencies, system impacts, and shifting priorities before they become surprises.
Communicate platform strategy, progress, risks, and value clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences — CIO-ready, not engineer-only.
Design every platform service with full awareness of enterprise systems, integrations, and the business processes they support.