About This Role
Managing information technology, this role is about building a dedicated Application Platforms team to empower software development teams with the capabilities they need to build, deploy, and run applications reliably and securely. As the founding leader, you will define the platform strategy, recruit and develop engineers, and personally build the initial services. This is a player-coach position, requiring hands-on design, configuration, and problem-solving alongside the team, while establishing the foundation for a larger organization.
Responsibilities
- Set the vision, roadmap, and operating model for Application Platforms, treating the platform as a product with developers as customers
- Roll up your sleeves to design, build, and operate early CI/CD and developer tooling capabilities while the team is small
- Recruit, hire, and grow a team of platform engineers; coach and develop the associate engineer on the team today
- Sequence work deliberately across the five functions, making clear build, buy, and partner decisions as capacity grows
- Partner with application development leaders to gather requirements and feedback, and to measure platform adoption and developer experience
- Work with Internal Audit and Security to maintain SOX-compliant change and deployment controls without slowing delivery
- Manage vendor and tool relationships, including licensing, renewals, and roadmap alignment
- Define and track service levels, reliability targets, and cost for platform services
- Collaborate with Infrastructure, Security, Data, and Enterprise Architecture on standards and shared capabilities
- Establish documentation, self-service patterns, and golden paths that reduce the load on the platform team
Requirements
- 10+ years in software engineering, platform engineering, DevOps, or SRE, with 3+ years leading engineers or technical teams
- Recent hands-on experience building and operating CI/CD pipelines and tooling (e.g., Jenkins, GitHub, Argo), and an understanding of how delivery controls support compliance
- Strong grasp of developer tooling and engineering practices, including testing frameworks, application frameworks, and security scanning in the pipeline
- Working knowledge of observability practices and tools (e.g., Dynatrace, Grafana, OpsGenie)
- Working knowledge of Kubernetes and container-based runtimes
- Familiarity with integration patterns and technologies such as APIs, messaging, and streaming
- Demonstrated ability to build a team from a small base, set priorities, and deliver with limited resources
- Strong communication skills, with credibility among both engineers and senior stakeholders
Nice to have:
- Experience in a SOX-regulated environment, working directly with audit teams
