Senior Director, Platform Engineering

Altana•New York, NY

9d•$295,000 - $345,000•Remote

About The Position

Altana is the network for trusted trade. Our AI-powered product network empowers governments and businesses to build a more resilient and secure global economy while keeping trade flowing. As the Senior Director of Platform Engineering, you will own the foundation that the entire Altana engineering organization builds on: the cloud infrastructure that runs our products and the developer experience that determines how fast and how safely we ship. You will lead a multidisciplinary organization spanning Cloud Engineering, Developer Experience, Site Reliability, and DevSecOps / Release Engineering — with end-to-end ownership of our build, test, and release pipelines. This is a moment of real transformation in how software is built. We are reorganizing our engineering practice around an AI-first, agent-first model, where AI coding harnesses and autonomous agents are first-class participants in the software development lifecycle. We are looking for a leader who has done this work before — someone who has built and scaled developer experience and platform organizations, and who has direct, hands-on experience and strong, well-formed opinions about agentic coding, AI-assisted development, and what it takes to make an engineering org dramatically more productive. You will set the technical strategy, build and develop the team, and personally raise the bar on engineering excellence. You will be measured by the reliability and cost-efficiency of our platforms, the velocity and happiness of every engineer who depends on them, and how effectively Altana adopts AI across the development lifecycle. Key areas under your stewardship Cloud Engineering: You will design, manage, and secure the multi-cloud infrastructure that powers our products — architectures that are scalable, flexible, resilient, and cost-performant across both commercial and government-compliant deployments. This includes the data platforms that support large-scale data processing, analytics, and machine learning, enabling our teams to work with world-scale datasets and build data-driven solutions. Developer Experience: You will own the infrastructure and tooling the engineering organization relies on every day — our monorepo, CI/CD platform, build systems, local development environments, and internal tooling — and the end-to-end experience of working in our codebase from clone to production. This is the center of gravity for the role: driving Developer Acceleration across the board and making AI-first, agent-first development the default way Altana engineers work. Site Reliability: You will ensure our systems are reliable, available, performant, and efficient. The SRE function establishes and monitors SLOs and error budgets, owns observability, drives toil reduction, and leads incident management so our services run smoothly and recover quickly from disruption. DevOps / Release Engineering: You will bridge development and operations, automating and optimizing the software delivery lifecycle from commit to deploy. Through robust CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure as code, your team ensures new features and updates ship rapidly, safely, and consistently.

Requirements

Experience building, leading, and scaling best-in-class platform and/or developer experience organizations, ideally in a rapidly scaling environment, including leading managers and senior engineers.
10+ years of real-world experience developing or managing complex engineering systems, with significant time spent owning developer experience, platform engineering, or the build/test/release pipeline end to end.
A proven track record of driving developer experience and developer productivity across an organization — you can point to concrete before/after outcomes (build times, PR cycle time, deployment frequency, reliability) from initiatives you led.
Direct, hands-on experience with AI-assisted and agentic development — AI coding harnesses, agent-first / AI-first workflows, and coding agents — and clear, well-formed opinions about how they change code review, testing, pipeline design, and engineering org structure.
Deep expertise with CI/CD systems (Buildkite, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or similar) and a demonstrated ability to scale them, ideally in a monorepo at scale.
Strong software engineering fundamentals — you design well-architected systems and lead from the front, not just from the org chart.
Production experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP), containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes), and infrastructure as code (Terraform / OpenTofu).
A track record tackling large-scale infrastructure in support of fast-paced ML/AI-enabled products and services.
Strong sense of shared ownership, a collaborative disposition, and excellent written and verbal communication skills.

Nice To Haves

Experience designing tooling and patterns that work across multiple clouds or isolated / air-gapped and compliance-constrained environments (FedRAMP, SOC 2, or similar) is a strong plus.

Responsibilities

Define and own a clear, multi-year technical strategy for Platform Engineering, ensuring the team stays focused on the highest-leverage work while advancing long-term architectural goals.
Set the reference architecture and standards for cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, and developer tooling, balancing immediate operational needs against strategic investment.
Make and guide key decisions on scalability, performance, security, and cost, working closely with engineers on the hardest problems rather than from a distance.
Lead build-vs-buy and platform investment decisions, including which tools, vendors, and open-source technologies to adopt across the SDLC.
Own the Developer Acceleration program: instrument and continuously improve developer workflows, driving measurable gains in build times, PR cycle time, flaky-test rate, and deployment frequency (DORA / SPACE).
Drive an AI-first, agent-first transformation of the software development lifecycle — making AI coding harnesses and agents reliable, governed, first-class participants in how Altana writes, reviews, tests, and ships code.
Set strategy for integrating AI-assisted development tools and agentic coding harnesses (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, and agent frameworks) into CI/CD, code review, local development, and release pipelines at scale.
Establish how AI-assisted and agent-generated code is reviewed, tested, secured, and governed — including LLM-aware testing strategies, evaluation and guardrails, and the supporting context engineering and tooling that make agents effective in a large monorepo.
Treat the engineering organization as your customer: gather requirements from application teams, translate vague friction into well-scoped platform work, and prove impact through before/after measurement.
Evolve our monorepo strategy — code organization, dependency management, build caching, and testing patterns — so it works consistently across our multi-cloud and compliance-constrained environments.
Establish and continuously improve best practices for monitoring, incident response, automation, and performance optimization across production and the delivery pipeline.
Drive a culture of ownership, resilience, and accountability to ensure high availability, performance, and security in our production environments.
Own reliability and cost across cloud infrastructure; conduct regular post-incident reviews and capacity planning to anticipate and mitigate risk before it reaches customers.
Partner across product, engineering, security, data science, and commercial teams to align platform investment with business objectives.
Communicate trade-offs, constraints, and roadmap clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders, and represent Platform Engineering to senior leadership.
Manage relationships with external vendors and partners, including cloud providers and tooling vendors.
Lead, coach, and inspire a multidisciplinary organization of engineers and managers across software, infrastructure, reliability, and developer tooling.
Manage distributed teams across multiple time zones, maintaining alignment and a cohesive culture in a remote-friendly environment.
Recruit top-tier talent and act as a top-notch recruiter yourself; foster professional development, recognize outstanding performance, and address underperformance constructively and in a timely way.

Benefits

Competitive equity grants
Discretionary bonus or a variable compensation plan
Flexible Time Off (FTO)
14 weeks of Paid Parental Leave (PPL) for non-birthing, adoptive, and foster parents
Up to 26 weeks of Paid Parental Leave (PPL) for birthing parents
Medical, vision, and dental benefits with generous employer contributions
High deductible health plan is 100% employer paid for employees
Employer contribution to Health Savings Account (HSA)
Flexible Spending Account (FSA) option
Life, short- and long-term disability, and AD&D insurance coverage at no cost
401(k) savings program
Commuter Benefits
Free premium subscription to Calm
Pet Insurance
Employee Assistance Program
Dependent Care FSA