Director of Platform Engineering, LanguageWire

• You are a hands-on technical expert on Platform Engineering:
• Public cloud (we use Azure & GCP)
• Cloud networking & distributed networking (servicemesh etc)
• Infrastructure as Code (Terraform)
• CI/CD pipelines (Azure DevOps)
• Modern software development processes (Trunk-based development, shift-left testing, CI/CD, …)
• Observability (OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Elastic, …)
• FinOps & cost optimization
• You are a leader:
• Proven experience with leading, motivating and engaging an international, distributed team of smart engineers
• You stand out as a trusted leader and respected mentor in your team
• Excellent communication and problem-solving skills
• Strong experience attracting and retaining top talent
• You are a team player:
• You love solving complex puzzles with engineers from different areas and different backgrounds
• You’re eager to understand how the different areas of the ecosystem connect to create the complete value chain
• Excellent presentation and data visualization skills. You’re comfortable reporting and presenting to the executive leadership
• Fluent English (reading, writing, speaking)

Desirable

• As Director of Platform Engineering, you will be responsible for a team of SREs and focus on several areas
• The first part of your role is technical leadership. As a technical leader, you will define our Platform Engineering vision to ensure that we have an observable, scalable, secure platform to run all our products and services
• Your second focus area is team leadership. As team leader, you will set the goals for your team members and help them achieve their goals.
• You will support your engineers to solve difficult issues and assist them in growing their skills. You will need to balance the team focus between strategic developments & evangelization and support the rest of our engineering teams
• Finally, you will focus on collaboration at multiple levels. We have a large tech ecosystem, and our Platform Engineering team is the foundation of our entire engineering setup.
• So, smooth collaboration with the rest of the tech teams is essential. You will team up with our Senior Director of Technology and collaborate with all other tech directors to ensure that we have a unified vision, and everyone is onboard with it
• We have 4 software teams working in 5 countries taking care of the continuous development of our platform. We strongly believe in building our own tech so we can deliver the best solutions for our customers.
• Our teams cover the full technical scope needed to create advanced language solutions with AI, complex web-based tools, workflow engines, large scale data stores and much more. Our technology and linguistic data assets set us apart from the competition and we’re proud of that
• You will work closely with the other 5 tech directors and report to our Senior Director of Technology
• Leading a tribe of 6-8 SREs:
• Building a culture of trust, ownership and innovation
• Being a trusted mentor to your team and helping your colleagues to grow professionally
• Guiding the planning of the team in a data-driven way using the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) framework
• Pushing our engineering excellence forward across the entire organization:
• Providing strategic direction & vision in the form of a platform engineering roadmap to ensure scalability, resilience, security, capacity, and operational maintenance
• Working closely with our Technical Enablement team (architecture, data, security and performance) to ensure alignment
• Driving the strategy execution across the entire tech organization by closely collaborating with other tech directors and teams
• Supporting engineering teams so they are empowered to operate their own products and services. We follow the “you build it, you run it” paradigm
• Ensuring optional operations of our products and services:
• Ensuring that our common infrastructure and services work flawlessly
• Ensuring great observability across the entire ecosystem
• Keeping our costs under control by applying FinOps practices
• In one year, you’ll know you were successful if…
• We have consolidated our common infrastructure, our CI/CD pipelines & our observability stack across the entire organization
• Engineering teams are fully autonomous and consistently adapt your internal products
• Your team regards you as a trusted expert and mentor in the Platform Engineering domain
• You have helped the team grow – both in numbers and in capabilities