Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
Platform engineering has become a core differentiator for SaaS companies that need reliability, security, and developer productivity to scale product delivery. This Director of Platform Engineering role stands out because it is explicitly framed around setting platform and infrastructure strategy and, critically, driving adoption of shared capabilities across multiple development teams. That emphasis signals a platform function designed as an internal product, not just a back office operations group.
For a SaaS career, the long-term value is exposure to the mechanics of building leverage through self service platforms, reusable architectural patterns, and a measurable service catalog. The listing also points to close partnership with product leadership and an expectation of data driven decision making, which are increasingly central to platform organizations that must demonstrate business impact rather than only technical output.
This role is best suited to an engineering leader who enjoys operating at the intersection of strategy and execution, with a bias toward enabling other teams. It will fit someone comfortable translating technical roadmaps into adoption programs, aligning stakeholders, and building teams and operating models that make platform practices stick across an organization.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
As the Director of Platform Engineering at Checkr, you will be responsible for driving the organization's overall platform and infrastructure strategy. To achieve this, you will need to have a deep understanding of platform engineering and how to drive a strategic roadmap of foundational capabilities and, most importantly, its adoption by the other development teams.
What you’ll do
- Guide the technical vision and strategy for the best-in-class highly scalable, available, and secure platform and infrastructure.
- Create a broad catalog of services based on capabilities and platforms that can be leveraged by other engineering teams at Checkr.
- Develop and drive platform architecture practices that encourage common solution elements, patterns, and reuse.
- Build a cross-collaborative culture between the platform and other engineering teams.
- Operationalize and manage delivery across the platform engineering team, scaling processes and systems.
- Foster an action-bias culture for product innovation and delivery, high performance, transparency, and continuous improvement.
- Work across the engineering team to shape software development to meet Checkr's objectives and key results.
- Build a diverse, equitable, inclusive culture that helps all members feel like they belong
- Partner with product leadership to influence business strategy, especially in your area of ownership
- Bring customer centricity to your entire engineering team
- Hire, retain, and scale a world-class engineering team team
What you bring
- Demonstrated success in building and leading vision, strategy, and execution of platform engineering initiatives
- Experience with driving successful platform adoption programs, with the ability to demonstrate the business impact of such initiatives
- Data-driven mindset: you know that everything built must be measured to understand its impact on the business and drive your teams to build with that in mind
- Customer centricity: you understand that customer behavior and sentiment must be well understood to effectively build products for them; this can be understood both through data as well as qualitative discussions with customers
- Experience defining and scaling modern products (API, self-service, UX first products)
- Highly effective communicator with good people instincts - able to build trust and work well with a diverse group both internally and externally
- Willingness to lead in a hands-on, high-performance environment
- Organized, self-motivated and detail-oriented
- High degree of humility and accountability
- Experience leading, growing, and retaining high-performance engineering leadership at the Director+ level
What you’ll get
- A fast-paced and collaborative environment
- Learning and development allowance
- Competitive compensation and opportunity for advancement
- 100% medical, dental, and vision coverage
- Up to $25K reimbursement for fertility, adoption, and parental planning services
- Flexible PTO policy
- Monthly wellness stipend
