Director of Software Engineering Management (Platform, Veza) (Santa Clara)

• We are looking for a visionary and experienced Director of Platform Engineering to lead Veza’s core platform organization - the foundation that powers everything Veza delivers. This role owns three of the most critical engineering domains in the company: the Access Graph, the integrations ecosystem, and the data pipeline infrastructure that connects them. Together these systems process billions of permissions across the world’s most complex enterprise environments
• This is a senior leadership role at the intersection of scale, security, and AI-native architecture. You will set the technical vision and drive execution across multiple teams, partnering closely with product, security engineering, SRE and the ServiceNow platform organization as Veza evolves within one of enterprise software’s most strategic acquisitions
• This is a senior leadership role at the intersection of scale, security, and AI-native architecture. You will set the technical vision and drive execution across multiple teams, partnering closely with Product, Security Engineering, SRE, and the ServiceNow platform organization as Veza evolves within one of enterprise software’s most strategic acquisitions
• Define and drive the technical vision and strategy for Veza’s platform organization - spanning the Access Graph, integrations ecosystem, and data pipeline infrastructure - ensuring alignment with company goals and the evolving ServiceNow integration roadmap
• Own architecture decisions for distributed systems, high-performance graph services, and large-scale data platforms, setting the engineering standards and design patterns that teams across the organization build against
• Partner with Tech Leads and Principal Engineers on high-impact architectural decisions, ensuring the platform is built for enterprise-grade scalability, reliability, security, and observability
• Identify and champion emerging technologies and approaches - including AI/ML and graph-native capabilities - to continuously advance the platform’s performance and intelligence
• Establish and drive engineering excellence across the organization: coding standards, design review processes, operational practices, and the reliability and compliance posture required by Veza’s enterprise customer base
• Partner closely with Product, Security Engineering and GTM to translate business objectives and customer needs into platform capabilities, ensuring the roadmap reflects both near-term delivery commitments and long-term architectural investments
• Drive execution across complex, multi-team roadmaps - managing dependencies, resolving cross-team blockers, and maintaining delivery velocity across the integrations, graph, and pipeline organizations simultaneously
• Represent platform architecture in cross-organizational discussions with the ServiceNow platform teams, ensuring Veza’s foundational systems evolve coherently within the broader ServiceNow ecosystem
• Lead, mentor, and develop a team of engineering managers, tech leads, and senior engineers - building a high-performance organization that can operate at startup velocity while scaling to enterprise expectations
• Own the full talent lifecycle across the platform organization - hiring, onboarding, retention, performance, and succession - with particular focus on developing the next generation of engineering leaders from within
• Create an environment where strong engineers thrive: high autonomy, clear technical direction, meaningful problems, and a culture of craft and accountability.

Benefits

• Generous family leave
• Matched donations
• Annual learning stipends
• Flexible PTO
• Competitive retirement plan
• Paid volunteer time

Deep expertise in distributed systems architecture, cloud-native design patterns, and API design - with strong hands-on experience across AWS, GCP, or Azure and containerization technologies including KubernetesUnderstanding how identity and access relationships are structured across complex enterprise environments including cloud platforms, SaaS applications, and non-human identitiesExperience with graph technologies, large-scale relationship modeling, or graph database platforms - understanding the tradeoffs involved in building query engines and data models that power real-time identity and access intelligenceStrong experience with streaming and data pipeline technologies such as Kafka, Spark, or Flink - able to design and evolve the data infrastructure that connects hundreds of enterprise systems into a coherent, low-latency platformProven track record scaling enterprise SaaS data platforms and distributed systems - designing and delivering infrastructure that operates reliably at billions of data relationships across complex, multi-cloud enterprise environmentsExperience integrating AI/ML approaches into platform workflows, or leveraging AI for system intelligence at scale - strongly preferred12+ years of experience in backend or platform software engineering, with 6+ years in senior engineering leadership roles spanning both startup and enterprise SaaS environments - ideally including experience leading through hypergrowth phase, or major platform transitionStrong organizational and program management skills - able to drive execution across multiple roadmaps and cross-team dependencies simultaneously without losing sight of long-term architectural coherenceDemonstrated ability to lead, scale, and develop multiple engineering teams and managers across a globally distributed organization - building high-performing teams that maintain startup velocity while meeting enterprise-grade reliability and compliance expectationsProven track record hiring, developing, and retaining engineering leaders — with particular emphasis on building the next generation of technical leadership from within the organization