About the role

The Director of Platform Engineering is a senior technical leader within UniUni's engineering organization. You'll own the design, governance, and continuous evolution of UniUni's AWS-based cloud platform — spanning FinOps, infrastructure-as-code, database reliability, and cloud security. 

This role sits at the intersection of technical depth and organizational leadership. You'll make consequential architecture decisions while also building and developing the platform team, setting engineering standards, and driving cost accountability across the organization. As UniUni accelerates its expansion across North America, you'll ensure our infrastructure is ready for the next order of magnitude — secure, observable, and built to last. 

What You’ll Own 

Cloud Platform & AWS Excellence 

• 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. 

FinOps & Cloud Cost Management 

• 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. 

Infrastructure as Code & Platform Automation 

• 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). 

Database Platform 

• 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. 

Security, Compliance & Reliability 

• 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. 

Team Leadership & Organizational Development 

• 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. 

What You Bring 

Required 

• 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. 

Nice to Have 

• 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. 

How We Work 

• Outcome-oriented culture: we care about results, not hours. Leaders own their domain end-to-end. 

• Engineering-driven decisions: technical leaders have real influence over architecture, tooling, and team structure. 

• Operational discipline: we take reliability, cost accountability, and delivery rigor seriously at every level. 

• Continuous improvement: post-mortems are blameless, retrospectives are actionable, and learning is a core value. 

Our Commitment to Inclusion 

UniUni is an equal opportunity employer. We believe diverse teams build better products, and we are committed to creating an inclusive environment where everyone can do their best work. We welcome candidates from all backgrounds — if you don't meet every requirement but believe you're a strong fit, we encourage you to apply.