Senior Director, Platform Engineering

Altana is the network for trusted trade. Our AI-powered product network empowers governments and businesses to build a more resilient and secure global economy while keeping trade flowing. The Opportunity at Altana 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. Key areas under your stewardship 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. Your Responsibilities Technical Strategy & Execution 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. Developer Experience & Acceleration 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. Operational Excellence 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. Collaboration & Stakeholder Engagement 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. Team Leadership & Development 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. About You 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 US Salary Range and Benefits $295,000 - $345,000 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. Our Values Our values are the core beliefs that shape who we are, what we stand for, and how we behave. They form the foundation of Altana’s culture and integrity and guide how we hire, design, build, and connect with each other and our customers. Trust: Our customers and partners entrust us with missions of the highest importance. We honor that by keeping our word, meeting commitments, and ensuring every action we take reinforces confidence in us. We rely on each other to deliver, to speak openly, and to hold ourselves accountable. Resilience: In a world of uncertainty and complexity, our work must withstand challenges, evolve with conditions, and ensure reliability over time. Resilience is both how we operate and what we deliver. It’s how we respond when things don’t go to plan –– we adapt, we support each other, and we keep moving forward. Stewardship: We are stewards of every mission we touch. Because our work impacts lives and futures, we hold ourselves accountable to delivering mission impact and never compromising. Our responsibility extends beyond individual projects to the broader system of global trade. We believe that stewardship starts from within so that we can bring focus, creativity, and excellence to our work. Each of us is personally responsible for fostering a workplace where people can thrive. And we are stewards of the greater good of the company. By holding ourselves and each other accountable, we build a culture of innovation and collective success that reflects the scale of our mission. Courage: Courage is what unlocks the seemingly impossible for our customers. It’s the core value that drives us make bold moves and take on big, complicated network problems—the ones others avoid. We know success isn't guaranteed, but we have the audacious vision to believe a solution is possible and to build it. Courage fuels our growth mindset. It means embracing challenges that make us stronger, and it’s demonstrated by how we approach hard conversations and complex projects. At Altana, we believe that a diverse workforce enables greater creativity, performance, and adaptability. We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer and welcome you to join us as you are. Our employment opportunities and decisions are based on business needs and individual qualifications, without regard to race, color, religious creed, national origin, ancestry, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, genetic information, family care or medical leave status, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by the laws or regulations in the areas in which we operate. We prohibit discrimination and harassment of any type, in any situation. Offers related to employment at Altana will come from an Altana.ai email address. We will never ask for payment as part of the interview or onboarding process. #J-18808-Ljbffr