Director, Platform Engineering & Quality

Spotnana • Palo Alto, CA

2d • $210,000 - $280,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

Spotnana is seeking a Director of Platform Engineering & Quality to elevate engineering quality and platform reliability as the company scales. This role will shape the strategy, processes, and teams responsible for enabling high-quality product delivery while building a resilient platform foundation that supports every engineering team across the company. The position requires leadership and influence, with an ASAP start date. The role is based in Palo Alto, CA, requiring 1+ days per week in the office.

Requirements

• Proven track record leading both quality engineering and platform/infrastructure teams at scale.
• Deep expertise in modern test automation strategies, frameworks (e.g. Selenium, Playwright, Cypress), and QA tooling (e.g. TestRail, Allure).
• Hands-on experience with distributed systems and the shared infrastructure components that underpin large-scale SaaS platforms — including workflow orchestration (Temporal), messaging (Kafka), and databases (Cassandra, PostgreSQL/RDS).
• Strong command of cloud platforms (AWS preferred), Kubernetes, and infrastructure-as-code principles.
• Experience defining quality metrics, defect lifecycle management, and driving data-informed QA process improvements.
• Demonstrated ability to operate as a horizontal enablement function — influencing without direct authority across multiple product teams.
• Excellent communication skills; able to translate between technical detail and executive narrative.
• Familiarity with agile software development environments and tools like Jira and Confluence.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a world-class functional QA team, establishing and continuously improving testing practices across the organization.
• Own defect prevention end-to-end — from PRD ingestion to production release — ensuring new features ship with high confidence.
• Partner closely with product and engineering teams to translate complex product requirements into comprehensive, risk-based test plans with full feature coverage.
• Drive the adoption of internal automation tooling and TestRail to scale QA coverage without scaling headcount linearly.
• Define and track quality metrics — defect containment, escape, and rejection rates — using data to continuously raise the bar.
• Champion a shift-left testing culture, embedding quality early in the development lifecycle rather than as a gate at the end.
• Own and evolve Spotnana's shared platform infrastructure — including Temporal, Cassandra, Kafka, RDS, and adjacent services — that all product pods depend on.
• Build and lead a platform team that operates as a core horizontal function, enabling every product pod to focus on feature development without worrying about platform reliability, scalability, or maintenance.
• Define SLOs and reliability standards for shared platform components and drive continuous improvement against them.
• Partner with infrastructure, DevOps, and product engineering leads to architect the right operating model for platform ownership across the org.
• Serve as a technical thought leader and escalation point for platform incidents and architecture decisions.
• Recruit, develop, and retain top engineering talent across both QA and platform functions.
• Manage vendor relationships and tooling contracts relevant to your domain.
• Serve as a standard-bearer for engineering discipline: CI/CD best practices, QMS frameworks, and operational excellence.
• Drive a culture of transparency and continuous improvement through rigorous RCA processes, incident reviews, and blameless post-mortems.

Benefits

• Pre-tax and ROTH 401(k) options via Fidelity with up to a 4% company match
• Comprehensive benefit plans covering medical, dental, vision, life, and disability effective on your hire date. We cover 100% of your employee premiums and 85% of your eligible dependents
• Pre-tax flexible spending account options for health, dependent care and commuter expenses
• Flexible PTO in addition to 10 company holidays and an end-of-year company shutdown
• Up to 26 weeks of parental leave
• Monthly cell phone/internet stipend
• IATAN travel membership
• Pet insurance
• Financial wellness tools
• Calm app access

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director
• Education Level: No Education Listed