Director of Platform Engineering

Novi Labs is an AI-driven SaaS company based in Austin, Texas. Our mission is to improve the economic outcomes of energy investments. Novi was founded by industry experts, data scientists and software engineers to solve a hard problem in oil and gas: turning a huge volume of data into insight people can act on. Our customers include operators, hedge funds, research institutions, royalty buyers and energy investors who together invest hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Novi uses AI and better data to take risk out of those decisions.

Everything Novi sells runs on data: US and Canadian well, production and forecast data, delivered through our SaaS apps and APIs. The Director of Platform Engineering owns the systems all of it runs on. You’ll build and lead a new Platform Engineering group. It owns architecture standards, security and compliance, backups and recovery, monitoring and incident response, deploys and access, and cloud cost. You’ll also lead the work of bringing the platforms Novi has acquired onto one Novi platform: shared sign-in, one cloud and one way to deploy. The goal is simple. Product teams spend their time on product, and we find problems before our customers do. This leadership role is based at Novi’s HQ in Austin, TX, or remote. You’ll lead a distributed team, and you’ll stay hands-on enough to review a Terraform change or work an outage with your engineers.

• Build and lead Platform Engineering. Hire, coach and grow a team of DevOps and platform engineers, starting with three engineers.
• Set systems and database architecture standards. Review significant designs before they’re built, and push for reuse before we build something new.
• Own security and compliance. Lead SOC2 from plan to audit, run vulnerability management, and own identity and access across our environments.
• Own backup and recovery. Every production system backed up, monitored, and restored on a regular schedule to prove it works.
• Own monitoring, alerting and incident response. Every alert has an owner, there’s a named responder each week, and runbooks exist for the systems that matter. Partner with the Director of Software Delivery on incident reviews.
• Own deploys and access. Repeatable CI/CD, at least two trained people for every critical system, and secrets managed in one place.
• Own cloud cost across AWS and Azure. Monthly cost reviews with Finance, rightsizing, and reservation decisions.
• Lead the move to one Novi platform: consolidating onto AWS, shared authentication and shared deploy paths.
• Provide the paved road. Software teams keep building and running their own services, features and data pipelines. You give them the standards, tools and templates that make doing it right the easy path.
• Report platform health to the executive team monthly, with a scorecard the business can read.

• Every production system has an owner, monitored backups and tested restores.
• SOC2 has an owner and a plan the business can see.
• Alerts reach a named person, and we catch problems before customers report them.
• No critical system depends on one person to deploy it.
• Cloud spend has an owner and a monthly review.
• Product engineers spend more of their week on product.

Experience:

• 10+ years in infrastructure, SRE, DevOps or platform engineering, with 3+ years leading engineering teams.
• Deep AWS experience. Kubernetes (EKS) and infrastructure as code (Terraform) in production. Azure experience is a plus.
• Has owned a SOC2 Type II (or similar) program, not only supported one.
• Built monitoring, on-call and incident response practices that engineers trust.
• Designed backup and disaster recovery, and proved it with restore tests.
• Managed cloud spend at scale and can talk cost tradeoffs with a CFO.
• Experience with data platforms: Snowflake or Redshift, Postgres, MongoDB, Airflow.
• A player-coach. You lead from the front, and your team sees you in the work.
• Clear, direct communicator who can explain risk and tradeoffs to executives without jargon.
• Experience consolidating platforms after acquisitions is a strong plus.
• Comfort with AI-assisted engineering. Our engineers use AI coding tools every day.
• Oil and gas, geospatial or time-series data experience is a plus.

Education: Bachelor’s or advanced degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Experience level: Director

Novi values people who enjoy small, collaborative teams, keep a positive attitude, celebrate shared successes, and move outcomes forward through well-reasoned ideas and clear communication.

• Professional work environment that understands work/life balance
• Flexible leave policy
• Health, dental and vision insurance
• 401(k)
• Stock options