Director, Platform Engineering

Director, Platform Engineering - Financial Services Location: Chicago, IL We are seeking a Director of Platform Engineering to lead a team of approximately 7–10 engineers and managers focused on SRE, observability, reliability, and cloud platform engineering . This leader will be responsible for developing the team, driving technical strategy, improving platform reliability and performance, and partnering with architecture and engineering leadership in a highly regulated financial-services environment. Key Responsibilities Lead, mentor, and develop a team of SREs and engineering managers , including hiring, performance management, and career development. Drive SRE and observability maturity across a large-scale cloud platform. Establish and govern SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, incident response, postmortems, and reliability metrics . Lead initiatives around platform reliability, cloud efficiency, performance optimization, and reduction of engineering toil . Define observability strategy and roadmap across metrics, logging, tracing, dashboards, and alerting . Champion Infrastructure as Code, automation, golden paths, and standardized platform engineering practices . Partner with architecture and engineering teams on highly available, scalable, and secure cloud infrastructure. Drive engineering performance through DORA metrics and data-driven decision making . Ensure platform practices meet security, audit, regulatory, and compliance requirements within a financial-services environment. Key Technical Skills SRE / Observability AWS / Cloud Platform Engineering Kubernetes / EKS Kafka Terraform / Infrastructure as Code Jenkins / CI/CD Puppet, Chef, or Ansible Prometheus / PromQL Metrics platforms such as Mimir, Thanos, VictoriaMetrics, or Amazon Managed Prometheus Distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry, Tempo, or Jaeger Logging platforms including Loki, Elastic, or Splunk Strong understanding of SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, incident management, and reliability engineering Experience with highly available 24x7 mission-critical environments Ideal Background 10+ years of progressive hands-on software/infrastructure engineering experience. 5+ years leading engineering teams . Strong history of building and maturing SRE and observability practices at scale . Proven people-management experience leading engineers and managers . Experience in financial services or another highly regulated environment strongly preferred. Strong technical leadership and communication skills, with the ability to operate at both the strategic and hands-on levels. Recruiting focus: The strongest candidates will likely be Director/Sr. Manager-level SRE, Platform Engineering, Infrastructure Engineering, or Observability leaders who have managed both engineers and managers while still possessing deep technical knowledge of AWS, Kubernetes, observability, Prometheus/PromQL, Terraform, and modern SRE practices .