Director of Platform Engineering

First Due

3h•Remote

About The Position

This is a new, dedicated leadership role reporting to the SVP of Engineering, accountable for turning First Due's DevOps, SRE, database reliability, incident-management, and developer-experience practices from distributed and ad hoc into centralized and disciplined. The right leader brings genuine hands-on technical depth to build and run this function, and the executive presence to represent platform reliability and operational maturity to the ELT.

Requirements

CI/CD and deployment-pipeline modernization at scale
Formal SRE practice: SLOs, observability/alerting tooling, incident management
On-call/incident-management program design (e.g., PagerDuty or equivalent) and RCA practice enforcement
Database reliability/operations experience (schema governance, query optimization, backup/BCDR) for a high-traffic production database, or has directly managed someone who does
Executive presence: can talk to the ELT about reliability, risk, and operational maturity in business terms
Genuinely hands-on — willing to be in the pipeline, the dashboard, or the incident channel
All applicants must be authorized to work for any US employer in the United States.
Locality Media LLC is unable to sponsor or transition sponsorship ownership of employment visas at this time.
Hiring is contingent upon candidates successfully passing a criminal background check.
As part of the I-9 verification of authorization to work in the US, Locality Media participates in E-Verify.

Nice To Haves

Vertical SaaS, regulated, or mission-critical software is a plus; public safety experience is an advantage

Responsibilities

Assesses and centralizes CI/CD and deployment practices across product lines; owns the rollout
Directly contributes where useful — e.g., containerizing and automating deployments, not just directing others
Improves deployment frequency, predictability, environment consistency, and release safety
Stands up SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, and production reliability standards
Owns monitoring, alerting, and observability patterns/dashboards, standardized across teams
Partners with development teams on consistent instrumentation rather than owning their code
Owns on-call tooling, rotation design, and escalation policy company-wide, partnering with Support, Product, QA, and Development to ensure comprehensive escalation resolutions
Defines and enforces RCA and post-incident review discipline, using AI to speed investigation and information-gathering
Builds these as adopted practices across teams that don't report to this role — requires real influence without authority
Owns operational reliability of First Due's core production database(s): uptime, query performance, capacity
Defines schema-change practice and review discipline for a monolithic, high-traffic database
Partners with Infrastructure on backup, continuity, and BCDR runbooks, and is accountable for testing them
Defines and implements the operational metrics set (deployment frequency, MTTR, system health, uptime), distinct from delivery/velocity metrics
Builds the dashboards and reporting giving engineering and executive leadership real visibility into system health
Formalizes the AI natural-language query layer already in use against observability data into a shared standard for "how we observe system health"
Partners with the owner of shared component libraries, frontend build tooling, and design-system/API contracts used by product teams — not feature UI work
Sponsors (without managing) a dotted-line Frontend Guild that drives convention adoption across module teams
Looks across product groups to spot shared structural patterns and drift — e.g., business logic embedded in frontend code that belongs in per-module backend APIs — and drives the fix
Influences cross-cutting platform architecture; does not own product/feature architecture or act as a Chief Architect
Builds this function's structure and hiring plan from the ground up, making the business case for each hire as the need is proven — headcount is not prescribed in advance
Establishes the team's operating rhythm (on-call, incident reviews, roadmap planning)