Senior Director Platform Engineer
About The Position
The Life Time Technology team is at the forefront of the evolution of Life Time into a digital-first company, transforming existing experiences and creating brand new ones both online and in our clubs. Work is a team effort, and we are a highly motivated, highly collaborative team; we always win or lose together. We invest in our team members and ensure they have the tools and opportunities to learn, grow and thrive. Life Time is the nation's only Healthy Way of Life brand. As we transform our technology foundation, the Senior Director of Platform Engineering owns how Life Time builds, operates, and evolves its core platforms — cloud, data center, identity and access, storage, and the internal services that let every engineering team move faster. This leader is an engineer first and a product thinker by practice. They treat internal engineering teams as customers and build platforms accordingly. Reliability is a feature. Self-service is a design goal. The mandate is the shift from reactive operations to proactive, product-driven engineering.
Requirements
- Minimum 15+ years in infrastructure or platform engineering, including 7+ leading engineering teams.
- Hands-on fluency with IaC tooling (Terraform required; Ansible a plus).
- Demonstrated experience building or maturing an SRE or platform engineering function — not just running ops.
- Architectural-level knowledge of AWS and/or Azure (networking, compute, identity, storage, cost).
- Experience owning an enterprise identity platform (Active Directory, Entra ID, Okta, or equivalent) and Zero Trust principles.
- Proven ability to shift team culture and practices toward engineering excellence.
- Bachelor's in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Nice To Haves
- Building an internal developer platform or self-service infrastructure layer.
- GitOps tooling (ArgoCD, Flux).
- Kubernetes and container orchestration at scale.
- Observability stack ownership (OpenTelemetry, Datadog, Grafana).
- Compliance frameworks: SOX, PCI, HIPAA.
- Consumer-facing or multi-site retail/hospitality technology.
Responsibilities
- Platform Engineering: Lead the design, build, and operation of cloud, data center, and hybrid infrastructure on engineering-first principles.
- Drive IaC adoption so infrastructure is version-controlled, peer-reviewed, and deployed through automated pipelines — manual change is the exception.
- Own capacity planning, lifecycle management, and modernization of on-prem data center and storage.
- Define the hybrid-cloud strategy: what stays on-prem, what moves, and the engineering path to get there.
- Site Reliability & Operational Excellence: Establish SRE practices: SLOs/SLAs, error budgets, and reliability data that drives investment.
- Shift the model from incident response to failure prevention — observable, self-healing platforms designed for graceful degradation.
- Champion blameless postmortems and engineering-led root cause analysis.
- Identity & Access Management: Own and modernize the enterprise identity platform: directory services, PAM, and SSO/federation.
- Partner with Security to reduce standing access, enforce least privilege, and enable secure self-service.
- Internal Developer Platform & Developer Experience: Run the internal developer platform as a product, with a prioritized backlog, adoption metrics, and developer satisfaction as a north-star KPI.
- Give teams frictionless self-service access to compute, secrets, and deployment tooling — the best platform interaction needs no ticket.
- Leadership & Financial Management: Build and grow a high-performing team — hiring for engineering depth, developing people, and fostering ownership.
- Manage operating and capital budgets transparently, framing investment in terms of reliability, velocity, and risk.
- Communicate strategy, risks, and progress to executive stakeholders in business terms.
Benefits
- A fully subsidized membership
- Discounts on Life Time products and services
- 401(k) retirement savings plan with company discretionary match (21 years of age and older)
- Training and professional development
- Paid sick leave where required by law
- Medical, dental, vision, and prescription drug coverage
- Short term and long term disability insurance
- Life insurance
- Pre-tax flexible spending and dependent care plans
- Parental leave and adoption assistance
- Paid time off, including 5 to 20 vacation days per calendar year (based on tenure) and paid sick leave
- Deferred compensation plan, if the team member meets the required income threshold
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
