Senior Director Platform Engineering

As the Senior Director of Platform Engineering you will own the foundation that the entire Altana engineering organization builds on: the cloud infrastructure that runs our products and the developer experience that determines how fast and how safely we ship. You will lead a multidisciplinary organization spanning Cloud Engineering Developer Experience Site Reliability and DevSecOps / Release Engineering — with end-to-end ownership of our build test and release pipelines.

This is a moment of real transformation in how software is built. We are reorganizing our engineering practice around an AI-first agent-first model where AI coding harnesses and autonomous agents are first-class participants in the software development lifecycle. We are looking for a leader who has done this work before — someone who has built and scaled developer experience and platform organizations and who has direct hands-on experience and strong well-formed opinions about agentic coding AI-assisted development and what it takes to make an engineering org dramatically more productive.

You will set the technical strategy build and develop the team and personally raise the bar on engineering excellence. You will be measured by the reliability and cost-efficiency of our platforms the velocity and happiness of every engineer who depends on them and how effectively Altana adopts AI across the development lifecycle.

Cloud Engineering: You will design manage and secure the multi-cloud infrastructure that powers our products — architectures that are scalable flexible resilient and cost-performant across both commercial and government-compliant deployments. This includes the data platforms that support large-scale data processing analytics and machine learning enabling our teams to work with world-scale datasets and build data-driven solutions.

Developer Experience: You will own the infrastructure and tooling the engineering organization relies on every day — our monorepo CI/CD platform build systems local development environments and internal tooling — and the end-to-end experience of working in our codebase from clone to production. This is the center of gravity for the role: driving Developer Acceleration across the board and making AI-first agent-first development the default way Altana engineers work.

Site Reliability: You will ensure our systems are reliable available performant and efficient. The SRE function establishes and monitors SLOs and error budgets owns observability drives toil reduction and leads incident management so our services run smoothly and recover quickly from disruption.

DevOps / Release Engineering: You will bridge development and operations automating and optimizing the software delivery lifecycle from commit to deploy. Through robust CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure as code your team ensures new features and updates ship rapidly safely and consistently.

• Define and own a clear multi-year technical strategy for Platform Engineering ensuring the team stays focused on the highest-leverage work while advancing long-term architectural goals.
• Set the reference architecture and standards for cloud infrastructure CI/CD and developer tooling balancing immediate operational needs against strategic investment.
• Make and guide key decisions on scalability performance security and cost working closely with engineers on the hardest problems rather than from a distance.
• Lead build-vs-buy and platform investment decisions including which tools vendors and open-source technologies to adopt across the SDLC.

• Own the Developer Acceleration program: instrument and continuously improve developer workflows driving measurable gains in build times PR cycle time flaky-test rate and deployment frequency (DORA / SPACE).
• Drive an AI-first agent-first transformation of the software development lifecycle — making AI coding harnesses and agents reliable governed first-class participants in how Altana writes reviews tests and ships code.
• Set strategy for integrating AI-assisted development tools and agentic coding harnesses (e.g. Claude Code Cursor Copilot and agent frameworks) into CI/CD code review local development and release pipelines at scale.
• Establish how AI-assisted and agent-generated code is reviewed tested secured and governed — including LLM-aware testing strategies evaluation and guardrails and the supporting context engineering and tooling that make agents effective in a large monorepo.
• Treat the engineering organization as your customer: gather requirements from application teams translate vague friction into well-scoped platform work and prove impact through before/after measurement.
• Evolve our monorepo strategy — code organization dependency management build caching and testing patterns — so it works consistently across our multi-cloud and compliance-constrained environments.

• Establish and continuously improve best practices for monitoring incident response automation and performance optimization across production and the delivery pipeline.
• Drive a culture of ownership resilience and accountability to ensure high availability performance and security in our production environments.
• Own reliability and cost across cloud infrastructure; conduct regular post-incident reviews and capacity planning to anticipate and mitigate risk before it reaches customers.

• Partner across product engineering security data science and commercial teams to align platform investment with business objectives.
• Communicate trade-offs constraints and roadmap clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders and represent Platform Engineering to senior leadership.
• Manage relationships with external vendors and partners including cloud providers and tooling vendors.

• Lead coach and inspire a multidisciplinary organization of engineers and managers across software infrastructure reliability and developer tooling.
• Manage distributed teams across multiple time zones maintaining alignment and a cohesive culture in a remote-friendly environment.
• Recruit top-tier talent and act as a top-notch recruiter yourself; foster professional development recognize outstanding performance and address underperformance constructively and in a timely way.

• Experience building leading and scaling best-in-class platform and/or developer experience organizations ideally in a rapidly scaling environment including leading managers and senior engineers.
• 10+ years of real-world experience developing or managing complex engineering systems with significant time spent owning developer experience platform engineering or the build/test/release pipeline end to end.
• A proven track record of driving developer experience and developer productivity across an organization — you can point to concrete before/after outcomes (build times PR cycle time deployment frequency reliability) from initiatives you led.
• Direct hands-on experience with AI-assisted and agentic development — AI coding harnesses agent-first / AI-first workflows and coding agents — and clear well-formed opinions about how they change code review testing pipeline design and engineering org structure.
• Deep expertise with CI/CD systems (Buildkite GitHub Actions GitLab CI or similar) and a demonstrated ability to scale them ideally in a monorepo at scale.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals — you design well-architected systems and lead from the front not just from the org chart.
• Production experience with cloud platforms (AWS Azure or GCP) containerization and orchestration (Docker Kubernetes) and infrastructure as code (Terraform / OpenTofu).
• A track record tackling large-scale infrastructure in support of fast-paced ML/AI-enabled products and services.
• Experience designing tooling and patterns that work across multiple clouds or isolated / air-gapped and compliance-constrained environments (FedRAMP SOC 2 or similar) is a strong plus.
• Strong sense of shared ownership a collaborative disposition and excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• You don’t hesitate to go to the dentist during the work day but you’re also the person on your laptop working on the team’s hardest problems to relax.

This role can be fully remote or based in any of our US Altana hub locations with hybrid work flexibility: Brooklyn NY Washington DC Boston MA or San Francisco CA

$295000 - $345000 USD

The salary range to the extent specified for this role is a good faith statement of the minimum and maximum levels of the annual based salary for the position. The base salary offered to a successful candidate will depend on a wide range of compensation factors including but not limited to work experience education and/or training critical skills and/or business considerations. Competitive equity grants are included in the majority of full time offers; and are considered part of Altana's total compensation package. Altana also offers either a discretionary bonus or a variable compensation plan depending on the role. Additionally Altana offers top-tier benefits for full-time employees including:

• Flexible Time Off: Altana operates with a Flexible Time Off (FTO) policy that gives you agency over your own time off so you can maximize your work-life balance.
• Parental Leave: We offer industry leading Paid Parental Leave (PPL) providing 14 weeks of leave for non-birthing adoptive and foster parents and up to 26 weeks of leave for birthing parents all paid at 100% of your base salary.
• Health Benefits: We have a full suite of medical vision and dental benefits with generous employer contributions designed to give you flexibility and choice for your individual health situation. Our high deductible health plan is 100% employer paid for employees and supplemented with an employer contribution to your Health Savings Account (HSA). There is also a Flexible Spending Account (FSA) option.
• Supplemental Benefits: Altana provides life short- and long-term disability and AD&D insurance coverage all at no cost to you so you know that you and your loved ones are covered in case of an emergency.
• 401(k) Savings: Save for and invest in your future using our Guideline 401(k) retirement savings program.
• Commuter Benefits: Save money on your commute by setting aside pre-tax funds for public transit or parking!
• Wellness: Because we value mental and emotional health every Altana employee has access to a free premium subscription to Calm the #1 app for meditation sleep and mindfulness.
• Pet Insurance: Pets are family too! Keep them healthy with Wishbone insurance and/or our Total Pet vet service and telehealth discount plan.
• Employee Assistance Program: Free access to confidential personal support.
• Dependent Care FSA: You will have access to a Dependent Care FSA which allows you to set aside pre-tax funds for childcare expenses.

The recruiter assigned to this role can share more information about the specific compensation and benefit details associated with this role during the hiring process.

What We Do

Altana is the world's product network empowering a new era of global commerce by uniting businesses and governments on a trusted AI-powered platform to build a safer more resilient supply chain. The United States and allied governments use Altana’s product network to enforce tariffs and manage their borders. Five of the world’s 10 largest logistics providers use Altana to efficiently manage cross-border trade and 140 million buyer-supplier connections are managed on the network.

Why Work With Us

Altana provides competitive base salaries full global benefits including a 100% employer-paid plan and tax-advantaged HSA and FSA options in the US. Plus we provide a generous PTO policy annual stipends for wellness and learning and development equity program and up to 26 weeks of fully paid parental leave

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