Associate Director, Platform Engineering

Role Overview

The Associate Director of Platform Engineering is responsible for spearheading the engineering teams that design, build, and maintain a secure, scalable platform tailored to support AI workloads within a containerized environment. This leadership position encompasses guiding multiple teams through their leads, setting engineering standards, and ensuring successful execution of enterprise platform capabilities in close partnership with Product, Architecture, Operations, Security, and other stakeholders.

Primary Responsibilities

• Lead and nurture multiple engineering teams indirectly through their team leads by providing technical direction, mentorship, and performance monitoring.
• Formulate and steer the engineering strategy and platform architecture to align effectively with business goals.
• Supervise the full lifecycle of enterprise platform services development and deployment using technologies such as Java, Spring Boot, Kubernetes, Kafka, and modern web frameworks.
• Ensure all platform solutions maintain security, scalability, reliability, maintainability, and operational resilience within distributed environments.
• Implement and continuously enhance software engineering practices, including code quality assurance, continuous integration and delivery, release management, incident handling, and operational excellence.
• Work collaboratively with Product, Architecture, Security, DevOps, Infrastructure, and Operations teams to deliver platform functionality and address cross-team dependencies.
• Assess technical designs and implementation plans to uphold architectural consistency and high engineering standards.
• Track delivery progress, identify and manage risks, and guarantee projects are finalized within defined schedules.
• Support production by promoting platform stability, optimizing performance, and leading incident resolution efforts.
• Champion the development of engineering leaders and foster technical growth throughout the engineering organization.

Essential Qualifications and Experience

• Extensive background in software engineering and technical leadership in enterprise-scale environments.
• Demonstrated success in leading multiple engineering teams or managing large-scale platform engineering projects.
• Profound expertise in Java, Spring Boot, Kubernetes, and Kafka technologies.
• Experience with cloud-native architectures, particularly on private cloud platforms.
• Knowledge of AI platform operations and enterprise-grade platform engineering.
• Well-versed in software development lifecycle, DevOps methodologies, release cycles, and production support.
• Strong leadership capabilities, skilled in stakeholder engagement, communication, and decision-making.
• Ability to merge strategic leadership with hands-on technical review and mentoring.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting AI-focused platforms or managing data-heavy enterprise systems.
• Familiarity with enterprise security protocols, system observability, resilience mechanisms, and compliance standards.
• Comfortable operating in matrixed organizations involving multiple stakeholder groups.