Director, Platform Engineering

Director, Platform Engineering - Financial ServicesLocation: Chicago, ILWe 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 ResponsibilitiesLead, 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 SkillsSRE / ObservabilityAWS / Cloud Platform EngineeringKubernetes / EKSKafkaTerraform / Infrastructure as CodeJenkins / CI/CDPuppet, Chef, or AnsiblePrometheus / PromQLMetrics platforms such as Mimir, Thanos, VictoriaMetrics, or Amazon Managed PrometheusDistributed tracing with OpenTelemetry, Tempo, or JaegerLogging platforms including Loki, Elastic, or SplunkStrong understanding of SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, incident management, and reliability engineeringExperience with highly available 24x7 mission-critical environmentsIdeal Background10+ 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.