Director of Platform Engineering

Patreon•San Francisco, CA

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

Patreon is a media and community platform where over 300,000 creators give their biggest fans access to exclusive work and experiences. We offer creators a variety of ways to engage with their fans and build a lasting business including: paid memberships, free memberships, community chats, live video, and selling to fans directly with one-time purchases. Ultimately our goal is simple: fund the creative class. And we're leaders in that space, with: $10 billion+ generated by creators since Patreon's inception 100 million+ free memberships for fans who may not be ready to pay just yet, and 25 million+ paid memberships on Patreon today. We're continuing to invest heavily in building the best creator platform with the best team in the creator economy and are looking for a Director of Platform Engineering to support our mission. This role is based in New York or San Francisco and open to those who are able to be in-office 2 days per week on a hybrid work model. We’re looking for a Director of Platform Engineering to lead the teams responsible for the core infrastructure and platform services that power Patreon’s product and ecosystem. This role is ideal for a senior engineering leader who has: Scaled a consumer, UGC, or marketplace platform to millions of users Led infrastructure and/or platform teams supporting product engineering at scale Operated in environments with high availability, bursty traffic, and complex distributed systems You’ll partner closely with Product, Security, Data, and Product Engineering leaders to ensure Patreon’s platform is reliable, scalable, and developer-friendly.

Requirements

10+ years of engineering experience with 5+ years in engineering management
Experience leading platform, infrastructure, or foundational backend teams
Proven track record scaling a consumer product, UGC platform, or marketplace to millions of users
Strong background in distributed systems, APIs, and service-oriented architectures
Experience operating production systems with high availability and performance requirements

Nice To Haves

Background in developer platforms, internal tooling, or platform abstractions
Familiarity with cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP), data pipelines, and event-driven systems
Experience leading through major architectural transitions or scale inflection points

Responsibilities

Lead and grow multiple Platform & Infrastructure Engineering teams, including backend services, APIs, developer platforms, and reliability foundations
Own the technical strategy and roadmap for scaling Patreon’s platform as usage, content, and integrations grow
Drive platform initiatives across: Core backend services & APIs Service reliability, availability, and performance Platform scalability and capacity planning Internal developer tooling and productivity
Partner with product engineering teams to enable faster feature delivery while maintaining platform stability
Establish strong operational excellence (on-call, incident response, SLAs, SLOs)
Hire, develop, and mentor senior engineering managers and technical leaders
Communicate clearly with executives and cross-functional partners about risks, tradeoffs, and platform investments