Senior Director - Platform Engineering/Site Reliability/DevOps Engineering

FICO is a leading analytics and decision management company that empowers businesses and individuals around the world with data-driven insights. As a Senior Director of Platform Engineering, you will define the strategy and technical vision for the GitOps platform, drive developer enablement, and lead a high-performing team of engineers to ensure operational excellence and continuous innovation.

Responsibilities:

• Define the technical vision and architecture for enterprise-scale CI/CD platforms, establishing the foundational design principles that ensure reliability, security, and developer-friendly pipeline experiences across all engineering teams
• Partner with engineering leadership to establish golden-path patterns, reusable pipeline frameworks, and onboarding standards that reduce friction and accelerate delivery
• Drive adoption of platform-wide pipeline observability, SLOs, and compliance gates in alignment with security and audit requirements
• Guide the team in evaluating and adopting emerging CI/CD tooling and practices that improve engineering velocity and reliability
• Define the technical vision and architecture for FICO's GitOps platform, establishing design standards that ensure auditable, reliable, and self-service application deployments across all environments
• Shape the architectural direction for deployment workflow automation, enabling event-driven delivery, multi-step release orchestration, and progressive deployment strategies such as blue/green and canary releases
• Collaborate with application engineering teams and architects to ensure the GitOps platform scales to meet evolving product delivery demands
• Champion GitOps as a discipline across the organization, building alignment and awareness among engineering and product stakeholders
• Collaborate closely with the team that owns FICO's internal developer portal (Backstage) to ensure platform engineering capabilities — including CI/CD pipelines, GitOps workflows, and infrastructure automation — are well-integrated, discoverable, and actionable through the portal
• Define the technical integration points between platform engineering systems and Backstage, ensuring software catalog accuracy, self-service scaffolding, and pipeline visibility align with the developer experience vision
• Partner with the Backstage team to surface platform health, deployment status, and infrastructure metadata within the portal, reducing context-switching for engineering teams
• Advocate for platform engineering needs within the Backstage roadmap, ensuring the portal evolves in ways that amplify developer productivity and platform adoption
• Collaborate with the infrastructure engineering team to shape the strategy for cloud-native infrastructure automation, ensuring AWS environments are provisioned through repeatable, auditable infrastructure-as-code practices
• Partner with Architecture and Security to define standards for infrastructure design, cost governance, tagging policies, and compliance across AWS environments
• Work alongside the team to evaluate and evolve tooling choices for infrastructure provisioning, bringing a working knowledge of Terraform and infrastructure automation principles to inform technical direction
• Facilitate alignment between platform engineering, software engineering, and cloud operations to ensure infrastructure strategy supports product roadmap and scalability goals
• Lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing team of platform and DevOps engineers, fostering a culture of ownership, innovation, and continuous learning
• Serve as a key executive partner to Product Management, Software Engineering, and Architecture — translating platform technical vision and architecture into roadmap priorities that directly support business outcomes
• Define and communicate the long-term technical vision and architecture for the platform engineering organization, building alignment around shared tooling, developer enablement, and operational excellence
• Represent platform engineering in executive forums, steering committees, and strategic planning sessions, articulating technical strategy in terms of business impact
• Establish engineering standards, operating models, and incident management practices that enable the platform organization to scale reliably

Requirements:

• 15+ years of experience in software engineering, platform engineering, or DevOps, with 5+ years in a senior director or equivalent executive leadership role
• Demonstrated experience setting strategic direction for enterprise CI/CD platforms and automated workflow systems, with a track record of improving engineering velocity at scale
• Deep understanding of GitOps principles and deployment orchestration practices, with the ability to evaluate tooling and guide teams toward best-in-class solutions
• Working knowledge of infrastructure-as-code practices and cloud infrastructure automation on AWS, with sufficient fluency to set direction and engage technical teams meaningfully
• Familiarity with software engineering in Go, Python, and JavaScript/TypeScript — comfortable reviewing technical approaches, engaging in architectural discussions, and setting expectations for code quality and platform tooling development
• Proven ability to build, lead, and grow high-performing engineering teams, with experience managing managers and developing senior technical talent
• Experience leading platform engineering organizations through periods of significant growth or transformation
• Strong cross-functional leadership skills with a track record of effective partnership with Product Management, Software Engineering, and Architecture organizations
• Exceptional communication and executive presence, with the ability to translate complex technical strategies into clear business narratives for senior and C-suite audiences
• Broad understanding of AWS cloud services and modern cloud-native architecture principles
• Experience in regulated industries such as financial services or healthcare, with familiarity around compliance frameworks including SOC 2 or PCI-DSS
• Background in platform-as-a-product thinking and internal developer portal concepts, with experience driving self-service adoption across large engineering organizations
• Familiarity with progressive delivery strategies and policy-as-code practices as a discipline
• AWS certifications or equivalent demonstrated cloud fluency are a plus