Director, Platform Engineering Manager

Who You Are:

You'll lead Platform Engineering — the team that owns the shared infrastructure services underneath every Digital Infrastructure engagement, and the forward-deployed engineers who embed with tier-1 clients. You'll set the technical direction for both tracks, develop the engineers on the team, and run the operational machinery that keeps the team and its engagements moving.

This is a player-coach role at the leadership end of the spectrum. You'll spend most of your time on people, strategy, operations, and execution — but you should be the kind of engineering leader who still reads the architecture diagrams carefully, pushes back on the right design decisions, and can hold a technical conversation with senior engineers at tier-1 clients.

You'll report directly to the Head of Engineering, Platform and Edge, who directs which engagements the team takes on and shapes the partnerships at the top. Your job is to make those engagements land.

The Stack

AWS (EKS, VPC, MSK, Aurora, S3) · GitOps with FluxCD · Terraform · Datadog, Grafana, Wiz · Kafka · KMS/HSM, MPC, AWS Nitro Enclaves · Postgres · Cloudflare for ingress and zero-trust.

What You’ll Do:

Lead the team

• Develop the engineers on the team. Both tracks should build expertise that compounds — no dead-end paths.
• Set the bar for technical excellence, operational rigor, and customer-facing craft.
• Bring on new engineers as the team evolves — measured, deliberate hiring rather than scale-up.

Own the platform

• Hold the technical strategy for the shared platform: compute, networking, observability, CI/CD, validator clusters, the data plane, secrets and key management. Major direction is set with the Head of Engineering, Platform and Edge; you own the call within that.
• Make the build/buy/reuse calls. Decide what gets generalized into shared platform capability versus what stays bespoke to a single engagement.
• Own production reliability for institutional-grade systems running in production.

Run the operational machinery

• Operate the rotation model end-to-end: deploy engineers into client engagements, rotate them back to harden the platform, sequence the moves so both tracks feed each other rather than drift apart.
• Run team logistics — staffing across engagements, capacity planning, on-call rotation, cadence of planning and reviews, incident response process.
• Coordinate across DIS, client-facing teams, and engagement leads so the right engineers are on the right work at the right time, and commitments to clients are sequenced against platform reality.
• Keep the team's operating system simple. Cadences, rituals, and process should compound clarity, not overhead.

Deliver on engagements

• Once an engagement is greenlit, own the team's execution against it — staffing, sequencing, technical quality, and what gets shipped.
• Step into client conversations at technical inflection points when the engagement benefits from engineering leadership at the table.
• Make sure lessons from engagements feed back into platform direction, not just engagement-specific code.

What We’re Looking For:

• A track record leading platform, infrastructure, or distributed-systems engineering teams in production-critical environments — financial infrastructure, custody, exchanges, payments, or comparable high-stakes domains.
• Experience leading small, senior teams. You know how to get leverage from a handful of strong engineers without adding headcount as the answer to every problem.
• Demonstrated operational chops — you've run the logistics of a team that ships across multiple concurrent workstreams. Staffing, sequencing, cadences, incident response. You can hold the whole picture in your head and keep it moving without bureaucracy.
• Strong technical depth. You don't have to write production code, but you should be able to read it, review architecture critically, and earn the respect of senior and staff engineers on technical merit.
• Experience operating in or alongside a forward-deployed, embedded, or solutions-engineering model.
• Comfort being customer-facing when the engagement calls for it. Tier-1 institutional clients expect engineering leadership at the table on technical decisions.
• High agency, low ego. We operate decentralized command — you'll own a clear mandate and be expected to drive within it without waiting for permission.
• Crisp judgment about when to generalize and when to stay bespoke. The platform thesis only works if you can tell the difference
• Embrace and champion the thoughtful adoption of AI to improve team performance and business outcomes.
• Leverage AI tools (e.g., generative AI, automation platforms, data copilots) to improve productivity, decision-making, and output quality in your day-to-day work.

 

 

Bonus Points:

• Blockchain / protocol experience — staking, validators, MPC, custody, DeFi protocol integration, tokenization infrastructure.
• Experience with MPC, HSMs, threshold signing, or secure enclaves.
• Background working with tier-1 financial institutions (banks, asset managers, custodians) as engineering counterparts.
• Experience building or scaling a forward-deployed engineering function from early stage.