Director of Platform Engineering

UniUni is a North American leader in last-mile logistics, rapidly expanding across the United States. The Director of Platform Engineering will own the design and governance of UniUni's AWS-based cloud platform, ensuring reliability and cost efficiency while leading a team of engineers.

Responsibilities:

• Define and enforce cloud architecture standards across all AWS services, ensuring alignment with the AWS Well-Architected Framework (Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Sustainability pillars)
• Lead quarterly Well-Architected Reviews (WARs) in partnership with AWS, translating findings into actionable roadmap items
• Own platform architecture decisions across compute (EC2, ECS, EKS, Lambda), networking (VPC, Transit Gateway, Route 53), and managed services
• Drive adoption of AWS-native services to reduce undifferentiated heavy lifting and improve platform resilience
• Own end-to-end FinOps practice: budgeting, forecasting, tagging taxonomy, chargeback/showback models, and monthly cloud cost reporting to leadership
• Identify and execute savings opportunities via Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, Spot usage, right-sizing, and architectural changes
• Partner with Finance to align cloud spend with business unit P&L and quarterly forecasting cycles
• Establish unit economics metrics (cost per delivery, cost per API call) to tie infrastructure investment to business outcomes
• Drive a culture of cost accountability across engineering teams
• Mandate and mature IaC-first practices across the organization using Terraform and/or AWS CDK; all infrastructure changes must flow through version-controlled, peer-reviewed pipelines
• Build and maintain reusable IaC modules and internal service catalogs to accelerate engineering velocity
• Design and govern CI/CD pipelines for infrastructure changes, including automated compliance gates, drift detection, and rollback capabilities
• Enforce GitOps and policy-as-code principles using tools such as Open Policy Agent (OPA) or AWS Service Control Policies (SCPs)
• Own the strategy, performance, and reliability of UniUni's multi-model database platform, including Amazon RDS (PostgreSQL/MySQL), NoSQL stores (DynamoDB, DocumentDB/MongoDB-compatible), and Elasticsearch/OpenSearch
• Define data tier SLAs, set standards for high availability (Multi-AZ, read replicas, global tables), and lead disaster recovery planning and testing
• Partner with data and application engineering teams on schema design, indexing strategy, query optimization, and migration patterns
• Evaluate and introduce emerging database technologies aligned with product and operational requirements
• Establish and enforce cloud security baselines: IAM least-privilege, secrets management (AWS Secrets Manager / Parameter Store), encryption at rest and in transit, and network segmentation
• Own the SRE function: define and track SLOs/SLAs/error budgets, lead incident response, blameless post-mortems, and reliability improvement programs
• Drive observability maturity across logs, metrics, and traces using CloudWatch, OpenTelemetry, and integrated APM tooling
• Ensure compliance with SOC 2, PCI-DSS, and other relevant frameworks through automated guardrails and audit-ready controls
• Lead, coach, and grow a team of platform and infrastructure engineers; build a high-performance team culture grounded in ownership and continuous improvement
• Define team roadmap, OKRs, and quarterly milestones in alignment with the broader Engineering and Product strategy
• Collaborate cross-functionally with application engineering, data engineering, security, and product leadership
• Drive technical hiring, onboarding, and career development programs within the platform organization

Requirements:

• 8+ years in cloud infrastructure or platform engineering roles, with 3+ years in a senior leadership position managing technical teams
• Deep, hands-on expertise with AWS — including compute, networking, storage, security, and managed services
• Demonstrable track record of building and maturing a FinOps practice, including measurable cost optimization outcomes
• Expert-level proficiency in Infrastructure as Code (Terraform required; AWS CDK or Pulumi a plus)
• Production experience with relational databases (RDS/PostgreSQL or MySQL), NoSQL (DynamoDB or DocumentDB), and search platforms (Elasticsearch/OpenSearch)
• Proven delivery of AWS Well-Architected Reviews and translation of findings into engineering initiatives
• Strong grasp of cloud security principles, including IAM, network security, secrets management, and compliance frameworks
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills — able to convey technical concepts clearly to engineering teams and executive audiences alike
• AWS certifications: Solutions Architect Professional, DevOps Engineer Professional, or Advanced Networking Specialty
• Experience in logistics, supply chain, or high-transaction B2B SaaS environments
• Familiarity with multi-region, active-active architectures at scale
• Hands-on experience with container orchestration (EKS/Kubernetes) and service mesh patterns
• Background in building internal developer platforms (IDPs) or platform-as-a-product philosophies