Director of Platform Engineering

Patreon•San Francisco, CA

3d•$340,000 - $425,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Patreon is hiring a Director of Platform Engineering to lead the teams responsible for the core infrastructure and platform services that power its product and ecosystem. The role owns the technical strategy and roadmap for scaling Patreon’s platform as usage, content, and integrations grow, while ensuring reliability, scalability, and a developer-friendly experience. The director will work closely with Product, Security, Data, and Product Engineering leaders and lead and grow multiple Platform & Infrastructure Engineering teams, including those focused on backend services, APIs, developer platforms, reliability foundations, and AI enablement. The position is based in New York or San Francisco and follows a hybrid work model requiring two in-office days per week. Patreon’s mission is to fund the creative class by helping creators build lasting businesses and get paid by their fans.

Requirements

10+ years of engineering experience, including 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 such as AWS or 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, reliability foundations, and AI enablement.
Own the technical strategy and roadmap for scaling the platform as usage, content, and integrations grow.
Drive initiatives involving core backend services and APIs, service reliability, availability and performance, platform scalability and capacity planning, and internal developer tooling and productivity.
Partner with product engineering teams to enable faster feature delivery while maintaining platform stability.
Establish operational excellence practices, including on-call, incident response, SLAs, and SLOs.
Hire, develop, and mentor senior engineering managers and technical leaders.
Communicate risks, tradeoffs, and platform investments to executives and cross-functional partners.