Director of Platform Engineering

Episode Six•Austin, TX

22h

About The Position

Episode Six is hiring a Director of Platform Engineering based in Austin, Texas. The DevOps organization has separate Platform Operations and Platform Engineering teams: Platform Operations runs production environments day to day, while Platform Engineering designs, builds, and evolves the infrastructure and automation that support them. The Director will lead a team of DevOps engineers and guide the technical direction of the platform powering payments for banks and fintechs around the world. This is a hands-on leadership role that requires ownership, forward planning, technical investigation, and team development. The role owns the roadmap, architecture, and quality of Episode Six’s in-house Infrastructure-as-Code and related tooling, which support multiple platform instances, Kubernetes clusters, and AWS infrastructure. The Director will adapt the platform to new clients, markets, regions, technology changes, and regulatory needs; keep platform components current; manage infrastructure costs; improve release tooling; and establish sound engineering practices. The role also partners across engineering, operations, security, and compliance; represents Platform Engineering with external stakeholders; reports on team and platform outcomes; participates in an escalation rotation; and travels occasionally.

Requirements

At least 8 years of experience in DevOps, infrastructure, platform, or site reliability engineering.
At least 5 years leading engineering work, including at least 3 years in a people-leadership role.
Deep hands-on experience with Infrastructure-as-Code and configuration-management tools; Terraform and Ansible are preferred.
Experience scripting in Python and Bash.
Extensive experience operating production workloads on public cloud; AWS is strongly preferred.
Strong experience running Kubernetes and containerized workloads in production.
Strong Linux background, including supporting Java applications on Linux.
A track record of proactively identifying risks and opportunities and taking ownership through resolution.
Demonstrated ability to lead troubleshooting of complex, cross-cutting infrastructure issues under pressure while keeping stakeholders informed.
Experience managing and optimizing cloud infrastructure costs at scale.
Experience working in a regulated environment such as financial services.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including explaining technical trade-offs to engineers, executives, and clients.
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent experience.
Authorization to work in either the U.S. or Canada; employment sponsorship is not available.

Nice To Haves

Experience in payments, card issuing, or a growth-stage fintech.
Experience operating multi-tenant platforms across multiple regions and regulatory jurisdictions.
Experience supporting hybrid-cloud or on-premises client deployments.
Familiarity with payment HSMs, particularly the Utimaco Atalla AT1000 series.

Responsibilities

Lead, mentor, and grow a team of DevOps engineers, setting priorities, engineering standards, and development paths.
Own the roadmap, architecture, and quality of in-house Infrastructure-as-Code and related tooling used to build and maintain platform instances, Kubernetes clusters, and AWS infrastructure.
Adapt the platform to requirements from new clients, markets, regions, technology changes, and the payments industry, including data residency and local regulatory expectations.
Plan and drive upgrades across Kubernetes, operating systems, databases, and the build toolchain; retire legacy components and deliberately manage technical debt.
Manage infrastructure costs, including cost visibility, forecasting, and continuous optimization in partnership with Finance.
Lead technical investigations of complex infrastructure issues, work hands-on with Platform Operations during escalated incidents, and drive root-cause analysis through to lasting engineering fixes.
Continuously improve CI/CD and release tooling used to release software to hosted and on-premises clients.
Establish and uphold engineering practices, including code review, infrastructure-code testing, change management, and documentation.
Partner with Platform Operations, Software Engineering, Information Security, and Compliance to keep the platform reliable, secure, auditable, and compliant with PCI DSS and other applicable standards and regulations.
Represent Platform Engineering with clients, prospects, auditors, and partners, including supporting technical due diligence and client onboarding.
Report team objectives, delivery, platform health, and infrastructure spend to senior leadership.
Participate in an escalation rotation and travel occasionally to client sites, E6 offices, or company events.