Senior Director, Platform Engineering

Altana is the network for trusted trade. Our AI-powered product network empowers governments and businesses to build a more resilient and secure global economy while keeping trade flowing. The Opportunity at Altana As the Senior Director of Platform Engineering, you will own the foundation that the entire Altana engineering organization builds on: the cloud infrastructure that runs our products and the developer experience that determines how fast and how safely we ship.

You will lead a multidisciplinary organization spanning Cloud Engineering, Developer Experience, Site Reliability, and DevSecOps / Release Engineering — with end-to-end ownership of our build, test, and release pipelines. This is a moment of real transformation in how software is built. We are reorganizing our engineering practice around an AI-first, agent-first model, where AI coding harnesses and autonomous agents are first-class participants in the software development lifecycle.

We are looking for a leader who has done this work before — someone who has built and scaled developer experience and platform organizations, and who has direct, hands-on experience and strong, well-formed opinions about agentic coding, AI-assisted development, and what it takes to make an engineering org dramatically more productive. You will set the technical strategy, build and develop the team, and personally raise the bar on engineering excellence. You will be measured by the reliability and cost-efficiency of our platforms, the velocity and happiness of every engineer who depends on them, and how effectively Altana adopts AI across the development lifecycle.

Key areas under your stewardship Cloud Engineering: You will design, manage, and secure the multi-cloud infrastructure that powers our products — architectures that are scalable, flexible, resilient, and cost-performant across both commercial and government-compliant deployments. This includes the data platforms that support large-scale data processing, analytics, and machine learning, enabling our teams to work with world-scale datasets and build data-driven solutions. Developer Experience: You will own the infrastructure and tooling the engineering organization relies on every day — our monorepo, CI/CD platform, build systems, local development environments, and internal tooling — and the end-to-end experience of working in our codebase from clone to production.

This is the center of gravity for the role: driving Developer Acceleration across the board and making AI-first, agent-first development the default way Altana engineers work. Site Reliability: You will ensure our systems are reliable, available, performant, and efficient. The SRE function establishes and monitors SLOs and error budgets, owns observability, drives toil reduction, and leads incident management so our services run smoothly and recover quickly from disruption.

DevOps / Release Engineering: You will bridge development and operations, automating and optimizing the software delivery lifecycle from commit to deploy. Through robust CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure as code, your team ensures new features and updates ship rapidly, safely, and consistently.

Responsibilities

Technical Strategy & Execution Define and own a clear, multi-year technical strategy for Platform Engineering, ensuring the team stays focused on the highest-leverage work while advancing long-term architectural goals. Set the reference architecture and standards for cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, and developer tooling, balancing immediate operational needs against strategic investment. Make and guide key decisions on scalability, performance, security, and cost, working closely with engineers on the hardest problems rather than from a distance.

Lead build-vs-buy and platform investment decisions, including which tools, vendors, and open-source technologies to adopt across the SDLC.