Head of Platform & Infrastructure Engineering

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Head of Platform & Infrastructure Engineering based in the United States.

We are looking for an experienced engineering leader to oversee and scale Platform & Infrastructure Engineering, ensuring the performance, reliability, and scalability of a rapidly growing technology platform. In this strategic role, you will define the long-term infrastructure vision, build high-performing engineering teams, and drive operational excellence across distributed systems. You will work closely with Product Engineering and other departments to enable fast, independent development without compromising system stability. You will also lead improvements in monitoring, incident management, cloud infrastructure, and developer experience. This is an opportunity to combine technical depth with organizational leadership in a highly autonomous, remote-first engineering environment. The ideal candidate is passionate about engineering excellence, empowering exceptional talent, and building scalable systems without unnecessary processes.

Accountabilities:

• Define and maintain the long-term vision, technical strategy, and six-month roadmap for Platform & Infrastructure Engineering, aligning priorities with business growth and product needs.

• Build, scale, and lead the Platform & Infrastructure organization by recruiting senior individual contributors and engineering managers, developing hiring strategies, and planning future team structures.

• Manage and mentor engineering managers while fostering a culture of ownership, autonomy, accountability, and continuous technical excellence.

• Establish strong partnerships with Product Engineering, ensuring development teams can move quickly while maintaining platform performance, reliability, and operational stability.

• Evaluate and continuously improve infrastructure monitoring, uptime measurement, incident response, and coordination with Support teams during critical events.

• Oversee relationships with strategic infrastructure and observability vendors, including AWS, ClickHouse, Datadog, and Braintrust, negotiating pricing and optimizing infrastructure costs.

• Drive improvements in developer experience and engineering productivity, potentially building a dedicated DevEx team depending on experience and organizational needs.

• Contribute to company-wide engineering initiatives, balancing immediate operational challenges with long-term infrastructure investments.

• Maintain hands-on technical involvement through code contributions, technical discussions, architectural decisions, and collaboration with engineering teams.

• Promote an engineering culture centered on deliberate communication, minimal bureaucracy, high-quality tooling, experimentation, and empowered decision-making.

Requirements:

• Significant experience leading engineering organizations through periods of rapid growth, either as a technical lead or senior engineering leader.

• Proven experience managing managers and leading senior engineering teams, including Staff and Principal Engineers.

• Demonstrated ability to recruit exceptional engineering talent, design effective interview processes, and establish scalable hiring strategies.

• Strong technical understanding of platform and infrastructure engineering, including cloud architecture, networking, hardware, distributed systems, and container orchestration.

• Practical knowledge of Kubernetes, including networking, load balancing, pods, and the underlying infrastructure that supports cloud-native environments.

• Experience balancing short-term operational priorities with long-term architectural investments while maintaining product performance and reliability.

• Strong collaboration skills and a track record of influencing initiatives across Engineering, Product, Sales, and Support.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to translate complex infrastructure concepts for both technical and non-technical audie