[Hiring] Director of Platform Engineering @First Due

Role Description

This is a new, dedicated leadership role reporting to the SVP of Engineering, accountable for turning First Due's DevOps, SRE, database reliability, incident-management, and developer-experience practices from distributed and ad hoc into centralized and disciplined. The right leader brings genuine hands-on technical depth to build and run this function, and the executive presence to represent platform reliability and operational maturity to the ELT.

Key Responsibilities

• DevOps & CI/CD
  • Assesses and centralizes CI/CD and deployment practices across product lines; owns the rollout.
  • Directly contributes where useful — e.g., containerizing and automating deployments, not just directing others.
  • Improves deployment frequency, predictability, environment consistency, and release safety.
• Site Reliability Engineering & Observability
  • Stands up SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, and production reliability standards.
  • Owns monitoring, alerting, and observability patterns/dashboards, standardized across teams.
  • Partners with development teams on consistent instrumentation rather than owning their code.
• Incident Management & Operational Discipline
  • Owns on-call tooling, rotation design, and escalation policy company-wide, partnering with Support, Product, QA, and Development to ensure comprehensive escalation resolutions.
  • Defines and enforces RCA and post-incident review discipline, using AI to speed investigation and information-gathering.
  • Builds these as adopted practices across teams that don't report to this role — requires real influence without authority.
• Database Reliability Engineering (DBRE)
  • Owns operational reliability of First Due's core production database(s): uptime, query performance, capacity.
  • Defines schema-change practice and review discipline for a monolithic, high-traffic database.
  • Partners with Infrastructure on backup, continuity, and BCDR runbooks, and is accountable for testing them.
• Engineering Operations & Metrics
  • Defines and implements the operational metrics set (deployment frequency, MTTR, system health, uptime), distinct from delivery/velocity metrics.
  • Builds the dashboards and reporting giving engineering and executive leadership real visibility into system health.
  • Formalizes the AI natural-language query layer already in use against observability data into a shared standard for "how we observe system health."
• Developer Experience & Shared Frontend Platform
  • Partners with the owner of shared component libraries, frontend build tooling, and design-system/API contracts used by product teams — not feature UI work.
  • Sponsors (without managing) a dotted-line Frontend Guild that drives convention adoption across module teams.
• Cross-Team Architecture Influence
  • Looks across product groups to spot shared structural patterns and drift — e.g., business logic embedded in frontend code that belongs in per-module backend APIs — and drives the fix.
  • Influences cross-cutting platform architecture; does not own product/feature architecture or act as a Chief Architect.
• Team Building
  • Builds this function's structure and hiring plan from the ground up, making the business case for each hire as the need is proven — headcount is not prescribed in advance.
  • Establishes the team's operating rhythm (on-call, incident reviews, roadmap planning).

Qualifications

• CI/CD and deployment-pipeline modernization at scale.
• Formal SRE practice: SLOs, observability/alerting tooling, incident management.
• On-call/incident-management program design (e.g., PagerDuty or equivalent) and RCA practice enforcement.
• Database reliability/operations experience (schema governance, query optimization, backup/BCDR) for a high-traffic production database, or has directly managed someone who does.
• Vertical SaaS, regulated, or mission-critical software is a plus; public safety experience is an advantage.
• Executive presence: can talk to the ELT about reliability, risk, and operational maturity in business terms.
• Genuinely hands-on — willing to be in the pipeline, the dashboard, or the incident channel.

Requirements

• All applicants must be authorized to work for any US employer in the United States.
• Locality Media LLC is unable to sponsor or transition sponsorship ownership of employment visas at this time.
• Hiring is contingent upon candidates successfully passing a criminal background check.
• As part of the I-9 verification of authorization to work in the US, Locality Media participates in E-Verify.

Benefits

• Comprehensive compensation and benefits package for eligible employees.
• Competitive pay, medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• FSA/HSA, 401(k), flexible PTO.
• Fully remote workplace, technology stipend, opportunities for advancement.
• Other benefits and perks that set our team apart.