Sr. Director, Platform Engineering

Prolaio•Chicago, IL

About The Position

The Sr. Director, Platform Engineering will be the senior leader responsible for shaping and scaling Prolaio’s cloud-native platform engineering capabilities that underpin its clinical, quality, research, and AI-driven data ecosystem. This role owns the foundational tooling (including observability, cloud infrastructure tooling, platform access, data access controls, and data lifecycle management), platform services, and shared engineering capabilities required to support secure, scalable, and governed access to data and platform resources across clinical trials, QMS workflows, clinical research, data science, analytics, and data services in a regulated healthcare environment. This role will ensure that core platform features and services are built with security, privacy, compliance, and auditability by design, and other regulatory expectations relevant to Prolaio’s clinical and patient-data environment. This role will partner with colleagues in Product, Engineering, Quality, Clinical Operations to embed security, privacy, HIPAA and regulatory expectations into every layer of the platform. This is a role for a self-starter and experienced engineering leader who brings both organizational leadership and strong technical credibility in designing, building, and continuously enhancing healthcare data platforms and AI-enabled platform features in a growth-stage company.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Data Engineering, Information Systems, Biomedical Informatics, Engineering, or a related field.
Minimum 15 years of experience in healthcare, medtech, life sciences, digital health, or another patient-focused environment, with meaningful responsibility for data platforms, platform engineering, or cloud-native enterprise platforms.
Minimum 7 years of experience as Sr. Director/VP Engineering or Platform Engineering.
Demonstrated success as a senior engineering leader, including building, scaling, and coaching engineering teams while maintaining strong technical judgment and delivery accountability.
Proven experience designing, developing, and successfully delivering modern data platforms or platform engineering capabilities that support analytics, data science, clinical operations, quality, and enterprise data use cases.
Strong experience with GCP and cloud-native platform engineering practices, including infrastructure automation, observability, access controls, API-first architectures, and scalable service design.
Strong software engineering experience using Python and at least one of Java or .NET, with familiarity building internal platform features, services, or developer tooling; experience with SQL is required.
Deep understanding of the capabilities needed to support clinical trials, QMS ecosystems, clinical research, data science, analytics, and data services in regulated healthcare settings.
Familiarity with metadata, lineage, catalog, governance, and AI-enablement tools, including platforms for semantic indexing, vectorization, retrieval, and data lifecycle automation.
Experience implementing data lifecycle management, governed data access, metadata or lineage-aware architectures, and platform controls that support traceability, reproducibility, auditability, and privacy requirements.
Strong working knowledge of healthcare security, privacy, and compliance expectations, including HIPAA and regulated system practices such as 21 CFR Part 11 and GxP-aligned controls, as they apply to platform engineering and patient-data systems.
Ability to operate as a self-starter in a cross-functional, matrixed, growth-stage environment, partnering effectively with CIO leadership, Engineering, Security, Quality, Clinical Operations, Product, Analytics and Data Science teams.

Nice To Haves

Experience with Angular or React is good to have.

Responsibilities

Lead Prolaio’s platform engineering strategy and roadmap to deliver secure, scalable, and reliable cloud and data platform capabilities aligned to business, clinical, and AI priorities.
Build and evolve the core platform tooling needed for observability, monitoring, logging, alerting, reliability, and cloud operations across GCP-based environments.
Own foundational platform capabilities for platform access, data access, identity-aware controls, service authorization, and secure environment provisioning.
Drive platform services and automation for data lifecycle management, including ingestion, validation, publishing, retention, archival, lineage, traceability, and audit readiness.
Partner with the Director of Data Engineering to strengthen Prolaio’s data architecture, API’s, data pipelines, and warehouse capabilities as part of the broader enterprise data platform.
Deliver reusable platform features and shared services that accelerate clinical research, analytics, data science, and data services teams.
Ensure platform features are designed with security, privacy, compliance, and HIPAA-aligned controls built in from the start, including support for regulated and validated environments.
Lead the development of AI-powered platform capabilities such as intelligent monitoring, workflow automation, metadata enrichment, and policy-aware access enablement.
Partner across Security, Quality, Clinical Operations, Product, and Data teams to embed governance, operational controls, and regulatory readiness into the platform lifecycle.
Build, mentor, and lead a high-performing platform engineering team with clear ownership, strong execution discipline, and a mindset suited to a fast-moving growth-stage company.

Benefits

Competitive salary
performance bonus
equity
Medical, dental, and vision plans with multiple options and strong company contributions
HSA, FSA, commuter benefits
a $1,200 annual Lifestyle Spending Account to support wellness, commuting, family needs, and more
Generous paid time off
sick leave
company holidays
Paid parental leave
caregiver leave
support for growing families
Company-paid life insurance
short- and long-term disability coverage
401(k) plan
telehealth
optional supplemental coverage