Technical Director - Platform Engineering

H&R Block•UNAVAILABLE, Missouri

23h

About The Position

The Technical Director, Platform Engineering is a senior, hands-on technical leader responsible for designing, building, and evolving the foundational platforms that power engineering across the organization. This role leads the development of scalable, reliable, and secure platform capabilities, enabling product teams to deliver faster with higher quality. The role combines deep technical expertise with leadership—driving architecture, building core systems, establishing best practices, and mentoring engineering talent. This leader operates close to the code and systems, setting the technical bar while enabling organizational scale.

Requirements

10+ years in software engineering, with significant experience in platform engineering or infrastructure.
Proven experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems.
Experience leading platform or infrastructure teams in cloud-first environments.
Deep expertise in cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
Strong experience with CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, observability, and automation.
Solid understanding of system design, distributed architectures, and reliability engineering.
Demonstrated ability to lead through influence and technical credibility.
Experience mentoring senior engineers and driving technical excellence across teams.

Responsibilities

Design and evolve core platform capabilities (cloud infrastructure, developer platforms, CI/CD, observability, data foundations).
Define and enforce architectural patterns for scalability, resilience, and performance.
Lead platform modernization efforts, including migration, standardization, and tooling.
Contribute directly to system design, critical code paths, and technical problem solving.
Guide engineering teams through complex technical decisions and tradeoffs.
Establish and review implementation standards, code quality, and system health.
Build internal platforms, tools, and frameworks to accelerate developer productivity.
Create reusable patterns and services to reduce duplication and improve consistency.
Drive improvements in engineering velocity, reliability, and cost efficiency.
Define and operationalize best practices across DevOps, SRE, security, and platform engineering.
Establish SLAs, SLOs, and operational excellence frameworks.
Ensure adherence to compliance, governance, and security requirements.
Mentor senior engineers and emerging leaders in architecture and engineering excellence.
Raise the technical bar across teams through coaching and example.
Influence hiring, onboarding, and capability development.
Partner with Product, Data, Security, and Infrastructure teams to align on platform strategy.
Act as a technical connector across teams, ensuring platform investments support business priorities.