Director – Platform Engineering

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Maryland.

📋 Description

• Take full ownership of the complete architecture of the Elastic estate, which includes deployment models, cluster topology, tiering, and multi-tenant isolation.

• Have final authority on decisions related to platform architecture.

• Lead the transition of the remaining ECE-based estate to ECK.

• Implement the existing engineering plan, address technical gaps, and ensure the program is completed without service interruptions.

• Stay actively involved in design reviews, upgrade planning, escalated troubleshooting, and prototype development.

• Oversee and refine capacity planning; predict ingest growth, size clusters and hardware, and drive procurement processes.

• Lead the weekly Platform Engineering change control meetings and represent the department at the enterprise Change Advisory Board.

• Manage ingest pipeline design and health, log source integration, and data quality benchmarks.

• Collaborate with Detection Engineering and Security Operations on enhancing detection and alerting quality.

• Plan and implement Elastic version upgrades with minimal disruption to clients.

• Maintain platform currency and manage risks associated with end-of-life components.

• Act as the designated Platform Engineering contact during Major Incident Management.

• Direct root cause analysis and resolution for incidents originating from the platform.

• Guide, mentor, and develop platform engineers; manage hiring, performance evaluations, career growth, and workload distribution.

• Oversee the operational cadence of the department.

• Lead the Engineering Leadership Roundtable across engineering, infrastructure, detection engineering, security operations, and product teams.

• Communicate platform constraints to product and commercial stakeholders.

• Manage relationships with Elastic, including licensing, renewals, true-ups, tool evaluations, and technical negotiations.

• Drive the integration of acquired environments, covering aspects such as cluster migration, ingest re-pointing, client mapping, and license consolidation.

• Establish standards for documentation regarding architecture, runbooks, and recovery processes.

• Proactively reduce reliance on key individuals as a specific early deliverable.

• Act as the accountable officer for platform-related control documentation and support SOC 2 and client audit evidence requests.

⛳️ Requirements

• At least 10 years of experience in infrastructure, platform, or systems engineering.

• Minimum of 4 years in leadership roles within engineering teams.

• Proven track record of ownership over a large-scale, multi-tenant data platform in a production environment.

• Experience working within a managed services, MSSP, or MDR setting where platform availability is contractually obligated.

• History of inheriting and stabilizing environments created by others, including reverse-engineering undocumented systems.

• Successful record of delivering a platform migration or consolidation program from start to finish.

• Extensive hands-on experience with the Elastic Stack at scale — including Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash, Beats, and Agent — particularly in multi-tenant cluster design and operation.

• Strong preference for experience with Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK).

• Solid understanding of log ingestion architecture, data normalization (ECS), index lifecycle management, and retention strategies.

• Familiarity with SIEM and detection engineering concepts; knowledge of detection-as-code methodologies is a plus.

• Proficient in Linux systems administration.

• Experience with containerization and orchestration, particularly Kubernetes.

• Knowledge of infrastructure-as-code practices.

• Expertise in identity and access integration: SAML, LDAP, SSO, and role-based access design.

• Skills in capacity modeling and cost-to-serve analysis for data-intensive platforms.

• Ability to maintain architectural authority while remaining receptive to alternate viewpoints.

• Capability to lead the execution of plans developed by others and build team trust.

• Comfortable managing a department where most tasks are unplanned while safeguarding strategic capacity.

• Clear communication skills, both written and verbal, with engineers and executives.

• Effective in a distributed organization across multiple time zones.

• Elastic certification is preferred, such as Elastic Certified Engineer or Elastic Certified Architect.

• Experience in 24x7 operational settings and formal change management frameworks like ITIL is preferred.

• Prior experience presenting platform status to enterprise clients or in audit situations is preferred.

🏝️ Benefits

• Flexible Paid Time Off.

• 401k plan with a company match.

• Comprehensive Medical, Dental, and Vision Coverage.

• Voluntary Short Term and Long-Term Disability options.

• Employee Assistance Program that includes a Mental Health Supplement.

• Voluntary Basic, Accidental, and other ancillary life insurance options.

• Contribution to Health Savings Account (with selection of a High Deductible Health Plan).

• 10 annual paid holidays.

• Fully remote work arrangement.