Director, Platform Engineering

Are you an experienced engineering leader with a passion for building scalable platforms, empowering teams, and driving reliability and developer excellence? We’re looking for a Director of Platform Engineering to join us at Thinkific.

As the Director of Platform Engineering, you will oversee infrastructure, site reliability, developer experience, front-end design systems, and quality assurance, ensuring that Thinkific’s platform is resilient, performant, and secure. You’ll lead a team of Engineering Managers and Engineers to evolve our cloud-native platform, drive technical strategy, and foster a culture of operational excellence and continuous improvement. You’ll report to the VP, Engineering, and play a key role in shaping the multi-year platform strategy that supports Thinkific’s growth, innovation, and customer success.

Your goal will be to deliver a secure, scalable, and reliable platform that accelerates developer productivity and supports Thinkific’s growth. Here’s how you’ll accomplish this:

Drive Platform Strategy

• Define and execute the long-term technical strategy for Thinkific’s platform, including infrastructure, cloud architecture, delivery pipelines, and core services

• Align Platform Engineering methods and measures with the broader company and engineering strategy

• Champion initiatives that improve scalability, availability, security, and developer velocity across Thinkific’s ecosystem

• Partner with senior leadership, Finance, and Security to manage budgets, vendor relationships, and cost efficiency for cloud and infrastructure systems

• Identify emerging technologies and industry best practices to continually enhance Thinkific’s technical foundation

Lead and Develop Engineering Teams

• Lead, mentor, and develop Engineering Managers and Engineers across core services, infrastructure, operations, and QA teams

• Build a culture of collaboration, reliability, and learning, emphasizing blameless postmortems, proactive incident management, and continuous improvement

• Support career growth and leadership development through coaching, feedback, and succession planning

• Drive recruitment efforts to attract and retain exceptional engineering talent

Enhance Reliability, Observability, and Developer Experience

• Oversee Thinkific’s Kubernetes and AWS-based infrastructure (EKS, RDS, IAM, ALB, S3), ensuring strong performance, reliability, and scalability

• Champion modern observability practices, leveraging tools like New Relic to define and measure Service Level Objectives (SLOs), Service Level Indicators (SLIs), and error budgets

• Guide the evolution of our continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) systems and infrastructure as code (Terraform), promoting automation and secure-by-default principles

• Define and track Developer Experience (DevEx) metrics using frameworks such as SPACE, DORA, and CORE4 to drive productivity and satisfaction across engineering teams

• Partner with Product, Security, and Data teams to ensure cohesive platform enablement across all domains

Lead the Quality Assurance Function

• Provide strategic direction and leadership for Thinkific’s Quality Assurance (QA) team, ensuring quality practices are embedded throughout the software development lifecycle

• Oversee the evolution and optimization of automated testing frameworks, CI/CD validation pipelines, and release quality standards

• Foster a quality-first mindset across engineering and product teams, balancing delivery velocity with reliability and customer trust

• Partner with Engineering and Product leaders to define testing strategies for performance, security, and end-to-end user experience

• Evolve and drive key quality metrics (defect escape rate, test coverage, release stability, regression detection) to continuously improve product quality and developer feedback loops

• Drive initiatives that align QA automation with infrastructure and DevEx improvements, ensuring cohesive delivery and rapid iteration

Operational and Strategic Execution

• Oversee the lifecycle of platform, core services, and QA initiatives from concept through delivery, ensuring outcomes are measurable, secure, and aligned with company goals

• Manage platform-wide risk mitigation, production readiness, and incident response processes

• Support the tracking and reporting of technical research and development initiatives (Scientific Research & Experimental Development, SR&ED; Industrial Research Assistance Program, IRAP), ensuring documentation and compliance requirements are met

The person we have in mind likely:

• Has 10+ years of experience in software, infrastructure, or platform engineering, including at least 3 years as an Engineering Director

• Has proven success defining and executing platform or infrastructure strategy in a fast-scaling Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) environment

• Has demonstrated experience leading or partnering closely with Quality Assurance or Test Engineering functions

• Has experience setting front-end and design system direction to accelerate product delivery and adoption of the design system

• Has strong understanding of Kubernetes, AWS, and infrastructure as code (Terraform)

• Has experience in distributed, event-driven architectures and large language models (LLMs)

• Brings practical experience with observability, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices, and frameworks like DORA and SPACE

• Has a deep understanding of cloud architecture, developer experience, and platform scalability principles

• Is familiar with secure software supply chains, Cloudflare, or advanced CDN/load balancing strategies

• Communicates clearly and effectively, articulating platform strategy and value to both technical and non-technical stakeholders

• Has a proven ability to build and nurture high-performing, psychologically safe, and inclusive teams

• Loves to learn and grow. They’ve found (and keep looking for) ways to level up their skills in this field, whether that’s through formal education, gaining professional experience, or maybe even building their own business

These things would also be nice, but we think you could learn them on the job:

• Experience with SaaS application stacks such as Ruby on Rails, Node.js, or Golang

• Experience building QA automation frameworks or managing quality engineering teams in a CI/CD environment

• Experience leading large (50+ person) engineering organizations or scaling teams through hypergrowth

• A strong professional network of senior engineering and platform leaders

We’re committed to fair and transparent pay that reflects both where you are and where you can grow to. This role has a salary range of $214,500 – $268,100 – $300,000 in Canada, designed to capture the full journey from developing skills to excelling in the position. Most new hires start between the minimum and midpoint, which aligns with being fully capable in the role. Salaries above the midpoint are typically reserved for team members who have demonstrated strong, consistent performance, deep expertise, and a significant positive impact within the role.

For high-demand or hard-to-fill positions like this one, we may hire above midpoint for candidates who bring exceptional experience, skills, or impact potential.

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging & Accessibility

This is just our initial idea of who we’re looking for! At Thinkific, we know that people have unique career journeys. If your experience is close to what we’ve described but you feel that you might be missing a few of the requirements, please still apply! We believe in equal opportunity and are committed to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging across every facet of our business.

We’re also committed to providing a comfortable and accessible interview experience for every candidate. If there are any accommodations our team can make throughout our hiring process (big or small), please let us know.