Head of Platform Engineering - Control Plane

Guardian Life Insurance•New York, NY

7d•$152,290 - $250,195•Hybrid

About The Position

As the Head of Platform Engineering – Control Plane, you will lead the development and implementation of our platform control plane initiatives which include governance layer as a code and all control functions directing our execution plan. Your role is pivotal in building and scaling a highly flexible, scalable, governed execution plane. You will collaborate closely with cross-functional teams, stakeholders, and technology partners to develop and integrate automation solutions that drive business growth, improve customer experiences, and reduce operational costs.

Requirements

Bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science, engineering, management or a related field.
Strong people leadership experience managing software engineering teams, including hiring, coaching, performance management, and developing senior technical talent.
Deep hands-on technical background designing, building, and operating distributed, cloud-native platform services in production.
Experience leading platform, infrastructure, developer platform, AI/ML platform, security platform, or other reusable enterprise engineering capabilities.
Ability to own the roadmap and delivery for control plane capabilities such as identity and access management, tenant boundaries, policy enforcement, approvals, evaluation gates, observability, auditability, FinOps, secrets management, and lifecycle/promotion workflows.
Strong understanding of enterprise governance, security, risk, compliance, and operational controls required to safely run AI or data-intensive systems in production.
Experience building reliable APIs, registries, workflow services, policy engines, or orchestration services with clear contracts for downstream engineering teams.
Proven ability to drive engineering excellence through architecture reviews, design standards, testing, CI/CD, observability, incident response, reliability practices, and operational metrics.
Ability to partner effectively with product, architecture, security, risk, compliance, operations, and domain engineering teams to turn ambiguous platform needs into scalable engineering outcomes.
Strong communication and influence skills, with the ability to simplify complex technical topics for senior stakeholders and align teams around platform standards.
High ownership mindset with a bias for durable, reusable platform capabilities over one-off solutions.
Must be legally authorized to work in the United States, without the need for employer sponsorship.

Nice To Haves

Experience with agentic AI systems, LLM platforms, model gateways, tool/action gateways, agent registries, evaluation frameworks, or AI developer tooling.
Familiarity with AI governance patterns such as prompt-injection defense, PII handling, output filtering, risk tiering, model/tool allow-lists, HITL controls, and audit trails.
Experience with AWS-based platform engineering, including services such as Bedrock, SageMaker, Lambda, DynamoDB, API Gateway, EKS, IAM, CloudWatch, and related DevOps tooling.
Experience designing or operating multi-tenant platforms with RBAC/ABAC, entitlement models, service accounts, policy-as-code, and secure cross-account or cross-environment access patterns.
Knowledge of observability, tracing, telemetry, cost attribution, and platform-level operational dashboards for enterprise-scale systems.
Experience establishing developer-friendly paved roads, reference architectures, templates, SDKs, CLI tools, or self-service workflows that improve adoption and reduce support burden.
Experience working in regulated environments where security, compliance, data residency, retention, and auditability are first-class platform requirements.
Background in MLOps, LLMOps, AIOps, model lifecycle management, or production AI operations.
Experience with vendor integration strategies that preserve portability and avoid lock-in through stable platform interfaces and clear architectural contracts.
Comfort operating in a matrixed, global organization with onshore/offshore teams, multiple stakeholders, and evolving platform priorities.

Responsibilities

Lead the development and implementation of platform control plane initiatives, including governance layer as code and control functions for the execution plan.
Build and scale a highly flexible, scalable, and governed execution plane.
Collaborate with cross-functional teams, stakeholders, and technology partners to develop and integrate automation solutions.
Drive business growth, improve customer experiences, and reduce operational costs through automation.
Own the roadmap and delivery for control plane capabilities such as identity and access management, tenant boundaries, policy enforcement, approvals, evaluation gates, observability, auditability, FinOps, secrets management, and lifecycle/promotion workflows.
Drive engineering excellence through architecture reviews, design standards, testing, CI/CD, observability, incident response, reliability practices, and operational metrics.
Partner effectively with product, architecture, security, risk, compliance, operations, and domain engineering teams to turn ambiguous platform needs into scalable engineering outcomes.
Establish developer-friendly paved roads, reference architectures, templates, SDKs, CLI tools, or self-service workflows that improve adoption and reduce support burden.
Manage vendor integration strategies that preserve portability and avoid lock-in through stable platform interfaces and clear architectural contracts.
Operate in a matrixed, global organization with onshore/offshore teams, multiple stakeholders, and evolving platform priorities.

Benefits

Competitive compensation
Excellent medical, dental, supplemental health, life and vision coverage for you and your dependents with no wait period
Life and disability insurance
A great 401(k) with match
Tuition assistance
Paid parental leave
Backup family care
Dynamic, modern work environments that promote collaboration and creativity
Flexible time off, dress code, and work location policies to balance your work and life in the ways that suit you best
Opportunities to build communities and grow your career
Skill-building
Leadership development
Philanthropic opportunities