Formativgroup
Director of Engineering - Data Platform
engineeringfull-timeRemote/Austin, TX - Full-Time
SALARY
Not listed
WORK TYPE
remote
JOB TYPE
full-time
INDUSTRY
general
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About the role
What You'll Work On
- Lead a distributed engineering team across platform/product engineering, connectors, QA, DevOps/infra, AI implementation, data governance, and support.
- Own delivery, quality, release discipline, and execution of the technical roadmap.
- Install engineering discipline where it's thin: automated testing, QA, CI/CD, release governance, and versioning.
- Drive repeatable, perimeter-safe deployments, including containerization, infrastructure-as-code, secure deployment, and SOC 2 readiness.
- Partner with the Chief Architect on the connector framework, canonical metadata model, architecture decisions, and product IP.
- Build the team: assess current talent, retain the strong, hire the gaps, and align the team plan to the roadmap.
- Push practical AI use across coding, review, testing, ops, and engineering productivity.
What You'll Bring
- Engineering leadership experience; you have run and grown teams, managed engineers, owned delivery, and shipped real product.
- Hands-on technical depth in data platforms, metadata, backend systems, or platform engineering; enough to earn the respect of strong engineers.
- Experience building or rebuilding an engineering function from the ground up, especially in a startup or early-stage environment.
- Experience installing testing, QA, CI/CD, release process, or quality practices where they did not already exist.
- Experience directly managing distributed or offshore engineering teams across time zones.
- Security and compliance literacy for regulated buyers, including SOC 2, audit logging, SSO, data security, or secure deployment.
- Strong AI fluency, with concrete examples of how you use AI in your own work and across engineering teams.
How You Work
- You are a player-coach: technical enough to go deep, practical enough to ship, and comfortable getting into the work when needed.
- You operate with incomplete information and define the path when there is not one.
- You bring order without slowing momentum; you raise the floor on quality, process, and security while keeping the team building.
Bonus Points If You Have
- Experience taking an early-stage product to enterprise-grade maturity.
- Background in regulated industries such as financial services, insurance, healthcare, or government.
- Familiarity with perimeter/on-prem deployment, lineage, metadata, graph data, or migration impact-analysis problems.
What Success Looks Like
- The team has clear ownership, a stronger delivery rhythm, and a credible roadmap-to-release model.
- Testing, QA, CI/CD, release governance, and versioning are in place without slowing product momentum.
- The product is moving toward enterprise-grade readiness for regulated buyers.
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