Director of Platform Engineering

Qorali are supporting a client seeking a Director of Platform Engineering to lead the strategy, architecture, and delivery of their core platform. This is a senior technical leadership role overseeing a team of highly skilled engineers and owning the reliability, scalability, and security of the systems that power our products. You’ll shape the future of the platform from Kubernetes and cloud architecture to data streaming, networking, and GitOps while building a high‑performance engineering culture.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the technical vision and roadmap for Platform Engineering, ensuring our infrastructure is scalable, secure, and aligned with business goals.
• Lead and mentor a team of senior platform and infrastructure engineers, fostering excellence, accountability, and continuous improvement.
• Architect and operate large-scale Kubernetes environments, including cluster design, multi-tenancy, workload patterns, CNI networking, and operational maturity at scale.
• Oversee the design and governance of AWS cloud architecture, including VPCs, EC2, EKS, MSK, S3, IAM, KMS, Direct Connect, Transit Gateway, and security services.
• Drive our GitOps and infrastructure-as-code strategy, ensuring consistent, automated, and secure delivery using Terraform, Helm, ArgoCD, Flux, or equivalent tooling.
• Lead the evolution of our data streaming and processing stack, including Kafka/MSK and Flink, ensuring reliability and performance for high-throughput systems.
• Provide architectural leadership across networking, including routing protocols, firewalling, load balancing, and secure connectivity patterns.
• Partner with Product, Security, and Engineering leaders to ensure platform capabilities meet the needs of internal and external stakeholders.
• Champion operational excellence, observability, incident response, SRE practices, and continuous improvement.

Required Experience

• Proven experience as a Director, Head of Platform, or Senior Engineering Leader in a high-scale environment.
• Deep expertise in Kubernetes: cluster architecture, multi-tenancy, workload design, CNI networking, and operating clusters at scale.
• Strong hands-on experience with AWS: VPC design, EC2, EKS, MSK, S3, IAM, KMS, Direct Connect, Transit Gateway, and cloud security fundamentals.
• Demonstrated leadership of GitOps and IaC programs using Terraform, Helm, ArgoCD, Flux, or similar.
• Solid understanding of Kafka/MSK and Flink for streaming and real-time data processing.
• Advanced knowledge of networking: routing protocols, firewalling, load balancing, and secure connectivity.
• Experience managing and developing senior individual contributors in platform, SRE, or infrastructure teams.
• Strong communicator with the ability to influence at executive level while staying close to the technical details.