Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
Platform engineering leadership remains a defining capability for mature SaaS companies, where multiple product teams depend on shared infrastructure, reliability, and security to ship consistently. This Director of Platform Engineering role stands out because it is framed as an organisation-wide platform and infrastructure strategy mandate, with an explicit emphasis on building foundational capabilities and driving adoption across engineering teams, a common inflection point as SaaS platforms scale.
From a SaaS career perspective, the remit connects technical architecture with measurable business impact through operational efficiency and cost optimisation, alongside developer experience and standardisation. The mention of DORA metrics and engineering health indicators signals exposure to the operating model many SaaS organisations use to manage delivery performance. In addition, responsibility for AI-enabled development practices suggests direct involvement in how modern SaaS engineering organisations evolve tooling, workflows, and guardrails without compromising quality.
This role is best suited to a senior engineering leader who enjoys influencing across product engineering leadership, not only running a platform function in isolation. It will fit someone comfortable balancing strategy with execution, building and scaling teams, and communicating platform value in terms other engineering groups can adopt and sustain.
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
About the role
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
- Define and drive the technical vision, architecture, and service ecosystem for a highly scalable, reliable, and secure platform that enables reuse and standardization across engineering teams.
- Lead execution and delivery across platform engineering, scaling systems, and processes to improve operational efficiency, cost optimization, and alignment with business impact.
- Partner cross-functionally with product engineering leadership to drive customer-centric platform solutions and foster strong cross-team collaboration.
- Build and scale a high-performing, inclusive engineering team, fostering a culture of ownership, innovation, transparency, and continuous improvement.
- Lead the strategy and adoption of AI-enabled development practices, including tooling, workflows, and guardrails, to improve engineering velocity, code quality, and developer experience.
What you bring
- Demonstrated success as a Director+ level in leading, scaling, and retaining a high-performing engineering org of 30-40+ engineers
- 7-10 years of leadership experience leading infrastructure or delivery platform engineering initiatives. 15+ years of software engineering experience
- Data-driven mindset: you know everything built must be measured to understand impact; fluency with DORA metrics and engineering health indicators to assess and improve delivery performance
- Experience leading Platform teams, ideally, most of these teams: Infrastructure & Data Stores, DevX, SRE, and Core Services.
- Experience with driving successful platform adoption programs, with the ability to demonstrate the business impact of such initiatives
- Proven experience driving AI adoption across engineering teams to meaningfully increase developer productivity and operational efficiency.
- 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
- An A-player mindset with a strong bias for action: you raise the bar, move with urgency, stay resilient through ambiguity, and take ownership to deliver meaningful outcomes
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
