[Hiring] Director of Platform Engineering @Overstory

Role Description

We’re looking for a Director of Platform & Infrastructure to own and evolve our core engineering foundations. This role will lead our SRE, MLOps, and Platform teams, with a mandate to create leverage across the entire organization.

As a scaling startup, we’re evolving from early-stage infrastructure to a more mature, reliable platform that can support rapid product development and growing customer demand. This role is critical in helping us make that transition — building systems, standards, and teams that enable speed today while laying the foundation for long-term scale.

Partnering closely with product, data, and application engineering teams, you will set the technical vision, define best practices, and ensure our infrastructure enables teams to move fast with confidence.

This is a highly cross-functional leadership role for someone who combines deep technical judgment with a systems mindset, strong people leadership, and a passion for building platforms that empower others.

Time zone requirement: Europe (GMT/WET, CET, EET) and Eastern North America (NST, AST, EST)

What you'll do

• Own the platform strategy across Platform, MLOps, and SRE, aligning it with company and product goals
• Grow senior ICs (and eventually manages) across multiple teams, fostering strong technical leadership and healthy team cultures
• Define and evolve our platform vision, including developer experience, internal tooling, CI/CD, infrastructure, observability, and reliability standards
• Oversee MLOps systems that support model development, training, deployment, monitoring, and governance in production
• Partner cross-functionally with Product, ML, Data, Security, and Compliance to ensure the platform meets current and future needs
• Balance speed and stability, making thoughtful tradeoffs between innovation, cost, reliability, and operational excellence
• Set metrics and accountability for platform performance, reliability, and developer productivity

Qualifications

• 10+ years experience leading platform, infrastructure, or reliability teams in a scaling startup environment, including navigating ambiguity, rapid growth, and the transition from early-stage systems to more mature, repeatable platforms
• Strong understanding of cloud-native infrastructure (GCP strongly preferred), Kubernetes, CI/CD, and modern DevOps practices
• Experience supporting machine learning systems in production, including model deployment, monitoring, and lifecycle management
• A track record of building reliable, scalable systems used by fast-moving product teams
• Excellent people leadership skills — you know how to coach managers, grow talent, and build inclusive, high-performing teams
• Strong communication skills and the ability to influence across org boundaries
• Experience in data- or ML-heavy products

Nice to haves

• Experience with geospatial data, image processing or mapping technology

What you get

• To be part of truly mission-driven work that reduces wildfires, protects earth’s natural resources and helps solve our climate crisis.
• Flexible working environment with a lot of autonomy. We build our work days around our lives, not the other way around.
• Other benefits like a remote working budget, an educational budget and time to develop new skills.
• To be surrounded by an excellent, vibrant, smart team who have each other's back and believe in a culture of openness, tolerance and respect.
• Equity and a competitive salary.

About our team

We are a group of 100 people from all over the world. Fifteen nationalities are represented in our team. We work remotely from eleven different countries and we are looking for candidates that are also living and working in one of these countries: United States, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Ireland, Estonia, Portugal, France, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, and Canada. We meet up once a year in-person for our unforgettable team gathering event. We also offer the option to occasionally meet up for in-person collaboration.

Diversity & Inclusion

We place enormous value on diversity and inclusion and strive to continually bring in people of all genders, races, creeds, ethnicities, abilities and backgrounds. We believe that the best ideas emerge when people with different perspectives and approaches work together on a problem.

We’re always looking to diversify our team further, but we’re proud of the fact that four out of the nine people on our leadership team are female, 46% of the overall team are female and 20% of the team are people of color. Our team speaks fifteen languages: English, Dutch, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Luxembourgish, Lithuanian, Bulgarian, Cantonese, Estonian, Danish and Korean.

Our values

• Tackling the climate crisis is our greatest mission.
• We act with urgency.
• Our curiosity fuels our growth.
• We recognize that change is constant, and we find joy and power in exploration.
• We’re rooted in diversity.
• Just as ecosystems need biodiversity to thrive, our resiliency comes from our differences.
• We care for each other.
• We love the power of machines but we nurture each other as humans.
• Trust is fundamental.
• We assume the best in everyone, and we share ideas openly so that we have a positive impact.

Use of AI in Our Hiring Process

We sometimes use AI tools to support parts of our hiring process, such as helping us manage applications more efficiently or ensuring job descriptions are clear and inclusive. But don’t worry, all hiring decisions are always made by people, not machines. Any data processed by AI is handled securely in line with GDPR and our Privacy Notice.