Senior Director, Developer Platforms

Cox Enterprises•Atlanta, GA

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

Cox Automotive is one of the largest technology service providers in the automotive industry, supporting thousands of workloads and hundreds of engineering and product teams across a portfolio of market-leading brands. The Sr Director, Developer Platforms owns the end-to-end product engineering toolchain that makes all of that possible—from AI-native development tools and the core engineering ecosystem, to the engineering data plane, operational monitoring tooling, and the secure cloud landing zone on AWS. This leader is at the center of the software engineering transformation: as AI-assisted and agentic development tools fundamentally change how software is built, the Developer Platforms team sets the direction for how Cox Automotive engineers and product builders harness that shift, creating the paved roads and optimized environments that let hundreds of teams ship great software quickly and confidently.

Requirements

12+ years in software engineering or platform engineering, with 5+ years in senior leadership roles running platform or developer experience functions at enterprise scale
Deep, hands-on familiarity with the modern engineering toolchain: source control and developer workflows (GitHub or equivalent), artifact management (Artifactory or equivalent), CI/CD pipeline platforms, and container/Kubernetes runtime environments
Proven track record building or scaling an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) or developer experience function, including self-service capabilities, golden paths, and developer portals
Demonstrated experience leading operational observability and monitoring toolchains—including log aggregation, APM, and incident management platforms—at large scale
Hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure and secure cloud landing zone design, preferably on AWS, including infrastructure-as-code practices (Terraform or equivalent)
Experience implementing AI-augmented developer capabilities—including AI coding assistants, agentic development workflows, or LLM-integrated toolchain automation—and a clear vision for where this space is heading
Strong understanding of modern software delivery practices: DevOps, GitOps, feature flagging, progressive delivery, and observability-driven development
Ability to lead through influence across a large, matrixed enterprise with hundreds of engineering teams
Track record translating platform strategy into business value narratives for executive audiences
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent experience

Nice To Haves

Experience optimizing engineering environments for agentic AI workflows—understanding how autonomous coding agents interact with source control, pipelines, test frameworks, and deployment infrastructure
Background implementing enterprise developer portals and IDP frameworks (Backstage, Port, or equivalent), including integration with engineering data and metrics
Familiarity with enterprise MCP (Model Context Protocol) ecosystems and AI-native toolchain architectures
Experience applying developer experience measurement frameworks including DORA metrics, SPACE framework, and developer satisfaction surveys at enterprise scale
Background in automotive, retail, or other complex multi-business-unit enterprises serving a large internal engineering customer base
Experience leading engineering data and observability strategy—including engineering insights platforms, workload health dashboards, and developer productivity analytics
Relevant certifications in cloud (AWS), platform tooling (GitHub, HashiCorp), or DevOps practices

Responsibilities

Partner with senior Engineering and Product leaders across Cox Automotive's business units to deeply understand the Developer experience and continuously reduce the friction that slow teams down
Partner with Architecture, Engineering, and Product leaders to define and execute the multi-year Developer Platforms strategy, stewarding the vision for Cox Automotive's internal developer platform and the end-to-end Developer experience across discovery, development, delivery, and operations
Lead Cox Automotive's transformation toward AI-assisted and agentic engineering—moving beyond individual developer tooling to optimizing the entire engineering environment for how autonomous agents and humans work together to build software
Establish the "paved road" philosophy: create opinionated, well-lit paths and self-service capabilities that let hundreds of teams move fast without re-inventing foundational infrastructure or tooling
Own the strategy for AI-native development tools including coding assistants, agentic development platforms, and enterprise MCP infrastructure—ensuring Cox Automotive engineers have access to best-in-class AI capabilities and that those tools are deeply integrated into the Developer environment
Drive the roadmap for the engineering data plane—giving engineering and product leadership meaningful visibility into the health and quality of workloads across the enterprise
Represent Developer Platforms as a strategic enterprise capability to executive stakeholders, translating platform investment into measurable outcomes in developer productivity, quality, and speed to market
Ensure availability, reliability, and performance commitments are met across the full Developer Platforms toolchain—including AI development tools, engineering ecosystem (GitHub, Artifactory, CI/CD), engineering data plane, operational observability (Splunk, New Relic, PagerDuty), and the AWS cloud landing zone
Establish and track key performance indicators spanning developer satisfaction, platform adoption, deployment frequency, onboarding time, mean time to recovery, and agentic environment readiness metrics
Drive continuous improvement in platform efficiency and cost optimization across cloud infrastructure, toolchain operations, and vendor-managed services
Oversee security and compliance posture of the engineering toolchain, including the secure AWS landing zone, in partnership with Enterprise Security
Lead incident response and problem management for critical platform events that impact engineering teams across the enterprise
Maintain robust feedback loops with internal customers—engineers, architects, product managers—to continuously measure and improve the Developer experience at scale
Lead a multi-disciplinary platform organization spanning AI-native developer tooling, core engineering ecosystem, engineering data plane, operational tooling, and secure cloud infrastructure
Build high-performing teams through strategic hiring, talent development, and succession planning across platform engineering and developer experience disciplines
Foster a culture rooted in developer empathy, platform thinking, continuous learning, and a bias for enabling others to go faster
Manage performance, compensation, and career development for direct reports; develop the next generation of platform engineering leaders
Attract and retain top talent in the increasingly competitive platform engineering and developer experience space
Own the Developer Platforms budget, driving cost optimization across cloud, tooling, and vendor services
Manage strategic vendor relationships across the core engineering toolchain and cloud ecosystem
Build clear business cases for platform investments tied to productivity, quality, and speed
Enforce cost discipline through consolidation, automation, and toolchain rationalization

Benefits

The Company offers eligible employees the flexibility to take as much vacation with pay as they deem consistent with their duties, the company’s needs, and its obligations; seven paid holidays throughout the calendar year; and up to 160 hours of paid wellness annually for their own wellness or that of family members.
Employees are also eligible for additional paid time off in the form of bereavement leave, time off to vote, jury duty leave, volunteer time off, military leave, and parental leave.
Benefits of working at Cox may include health care insurance (medical, dental, vision), retirement planning (401(k)), and paid days off (sick leave, parental leave, flexible vacation/wellness days, and/or PTO).

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