Technical Director, Platform Engineering

NRG Energy•Seattle, WA

About The Position

Welcome to the intersection of energy and home services. At NRG, we’re driven by our passion to create a smarter, cleaner and more connected future. Vivint Smart Home, an NRG owned company, is a leading smart home company in the United States, dedicated to redefining the home experience with intelligent products and services. We find purpose in proactively protecting and keeping our customers connected to home, no matter where they are. Join the Smart Home team to create smarter, safer and more sustainable homes. About This Role We are seeking a Technical Director to set the technical vision for Vivint's Platform Engineering organization: the cloud services, event pipelines, APIs, and infrastructure behind millions of connected homes. This is a senior principal-level individual-contributor role with scope across a large organization. You will define platform strategy and architecture, and work closely with the Mobile and Embedded software organizations to make sure the platform meets their needs and that systems integrate cleanly end to end.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field, or equivalent experience
15+ years of experience building and operating production software systems, including 5+ years in principal-level or equivalent technical leadership roles
Track record setting technical direction for a large engineering organization (multiple teams), not only a single team or product
Deep expertise in large-scale distributed systems and cloud-native architecture (e.g., GCP or AWS, Kubernetes, event-driven systems)
Experience leading major platform architecture changes, such as migrations or service decomposition, from strategy through delivery
Track record of influencing peer engineering organizations and executives, and driving alignment without direct authority
Strong written communication, including authoring technical strategy and architecture documents

Nice To Haves

Experience with IoT, connected devices, or consumer smart home products
Working knowledge of mobile and embedded software, including device-to-cloud communication (e.g., MQTT) and mobile API design
Experience with AI/ML platforms, or integrating AI into platform services and engineering workflows
Experience with security, privacy, and compliance for consumer products
Experience with private cloud or hybrid infrastructure and cloud cost management
Experience establishing architecture review processes, engineering standards, or technical career frameworks

Responsibilities

Define the multi-year technical vision and architecture roadmap for Platform Engineering, aligned with company strategy.
Drive architecture decisions across the platform organization, including service boundaries, shared services, data flows, and APIs.
Partner with Mobile and Embedded engineering leaders to align on platform interfaces, device-to-cloud protocols, and integration patterns, and influence their technical decisions where they affect the platform.
Establish and govern platform engineering standards for reliability, security, scalability, observability, and developer productivity.
Advise executive leadership on major platform investments, build-vs-buy decisions, and technical risk.
Lead technical review of the highest-impact platform initiatives, and engage directly on the most complex problems, including those that span platform, mobile, and device systems.
Identify systemic technical debt and architectural risk in the platform, and drive multi-team plans to address them.
Develop principal and staff engineers, and shape technical career paths and the hiring bar for Platform Engineering.