Director, Platform & Architecture

Summary

Join Shopmonkey as the Director of Platform and Architecture to lead the evolution of our platform, ensuring reliable, scalable, and secure infrastructure. You will empower product development teams, accelerate development velocity, and maintain engineering excellence. Responsibilities include owning and evolving platform architecture, driving infrastructure improvements, leading internal tooling, supporting AI use cases, and leading a team of engineers. You will collaborate cross-functionally, define the long-term platform vision, and champion DevOps methodologies. This role requires 10+ years in backend/platform/infrastructure roles in high-scale SaaS environments and 5+ years in a leadership role. The ideal candidate possesses deep knowledge of various technologies and strong communication skills.

Requirements

• 10+ years in backend/platform/infrastructure roles in high-scale SaaS environments
• 5+ years in a staff, principal, or engineering leadership role
• Experience designing resilient distributed systems and scaling critical infrastructure
• Deep knowledge of: CockroachDB or a distributed SQL relational database
• Eventing systems like Synadia NATS, Kafka, or equivalent
• GCP, Kubernetes , and cloud-native deployments
• Node.js, TypeScript and Go in production
• Track record improving developer experience at scale
• Strong systems thinking and communication skills — able to drive decisions with clarity

Responsibilities

• Own and evolve our platform architecture across infrastructure, services, and data
• Champion performance, stability, and scalability as first-class engineering values
• Design for growth across messaging, scheduling, estimates, time clocks, and AI workflows
• Drive improvements in observability, reliability, and runtime performance
• Set architectural guardrails and SLAs to support a growing customer base (7,000+ shops)
• Be at the forefront of delivering a highly scalable and performant system as we grow to 10,000 shops and beyond
• Lead internal tooling, CI/CD, secrets management, and schema governance
• Enhance developer velocity by leveraging better abstractions and platform tooling
• Partner with App and Platform engineers to balance safety and speed across all squads
• Support emerging agentic AI use cases with real-time, secure, retrievable context
• Build the technical foundation for vector search, semantic retrieval, and RAG pipelines
• Enable embedding of assistants across Shopmonkey's UI and workflows
• Lead and grow a team of senior platform, infra, and ML infrastructure engineers
• Collaborate cross-functionally with Product and Application teams
• Drive architectural clarity and alignment across engineering
• Build, mentor, and inspire a high-performing team of platform and architecture engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence, continuous learning, and innovation
• Partner closely with product management, operations, and other engineering teams to understand their needs, gather feedback, and deliver platform solutions that enable their success
• Stay abreast of emerging technologies and industry trends, evaluating and advocating for their adoption where they can bring significant value to Shopmonkey's platform
• Define and champion the long-term vision and roadmap for Shopmonkey's platform and architecture, aligning with overall business objectives and product strategy
• Provide strong technical leadership and guidance across all engineering teams, ensuring adherence to architectural principles, best practices, and security standards for highly performant and scalable systems
• Drive initiatives to enhance the scalability, responsiveness, availability, and stability of the Shopmonkey platform, addressing challenges related to geographic distribution, peak demand, and data integrity
• Play a key role in attracting, interviewing, and hiring top-tier engineering talent to grow the platform and architecture team
• Champion and implement advanced DevOps methodologies, including zero-touch platform provisioning and robust CI/CD pipelines, to optimize our software delivery lifecycle
• Establish clear KPIs and metrics to measure platform performance, developer experience, and the overall impact of platform initiatives on business outcomes

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with AI infrastructure (e.g., PGVector, Weaviate, LangChain, embedding pipelines)
• Built or scaled infrastructure for real-time workflows (telephony, scheduling, agent orchestration)
• Exposure to vertical SaaS platforms with complex user and data models

Benefits

• Medical, dental, vision, and life insurance benefits available the 1st of the month following hire date
• Short term and long term disability
• Employee assistance program
• Reimbursement for a personal health and wellness membership
• Generous parental leave
• 401(k) available upon hire
• 11 paid holidays
• Flexible time off - take the time off you need!
• Matching donations for approved charitable organizations
• Group volunteer efforts
• Fully Remote Work!
• Up to $750.00 to set up your home office
• $20 phone/internet monthly reimbursements
• Virtual activities and in-person meet-ups
• Laptop and super rad swag provided
• Unique opportunity: This is the best form of hybrid! All teams get to travel and meet up for collaboration at least once/year
• Competitive salaries
• Comprehensive health coverage
• Flexible scheduling
• Generous time off