{"id":2578477,"url":"https://alion.io/job/theocc-director-platform-engineering","title":"Director, Platform Engineering","company":{"id":1768531,"name":"Theocc","domain":"theocc.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/theocc-com","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Workday","truth_index":null},"role":"Leadership","role_family":"Leadership","seniority":"head","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Chicago, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":174900,"max":292300,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":292300},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":10,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Agile","optional":false},{"name":"Amazon CloudWatch","optional":false},{"name":"Amazon EKS","optional":false},{"name":"Ansible","optional":false},{"name":"Apache Kafka","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"Azure","optional":false},{"name":"Chaos Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"Chef","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"CloudFormation","optional":false},{"name":"Configuration Management","optional":false},{"name":"Datadog","optional":false},{"name":"eBPF","optional":false},{"name":"FinOps","optional":false},{"name":"GCP","optional":false},{"name":"GitHub","optional":false},{"name":"Go","optional":false},{"name":"Grafana","optional":false},{"name":"Haystack","optional":false},{"name":"Helm","optional":false},{"name":"Incident Management","optional":false},{"name":"Jaeger","optional":false},{"name":"Java","optional":false},{"name":"Jenkins","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"Loki","optional":false},{"name":"Mimir","optional":false},{"name":"OpenTelemetry","optional":false},{"name":"Opsgenie","optional":false},{"name":"PagerDuty","optional":false},{"name":"Platform Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"Prometheus","optional":false},{"name":"Pulumi","optional":false},{"name":"Puppet","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Ray","optional":false},{"name":"Ruby","optional":false},{"name":"Scrum","optional":false},{"name":"ServiceNow","optional":false},{"name":"SLI/SLO/SLA","optional":false},{"name":"Splunk","optional":false},{"name":"Terraform","optional":false},{"name":"Thanos","optional":false},{"name":"Time Series Forecasting","optional":false},{"name":"Vector","optional":false},{"name":"VictoriaMetrics","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-01T00:00:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-01","last_verified_at":"2026-10-15T05:55:52Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":14,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":14},"description":"To be considered for this position, applications and resumes are accepted only through our careers site by directly applying to the posted job. We do not accept unsolicited resumes or sales solicitations from staffing agencies. Any OCC employee wishing to submit a referral must do so through their Workday account. Any resume submitted outside of an active job posting will not be considered for employment.\nWhat You'll Do:\nSummary\n2-3 sentences describing the overall responsibilities.\nThis is a people-management role with full supervisory responsibility for a team of engineers and managers. The Director will lead and manage this team to drive reliability, observability, and cloud platform engineering excellence across a large, complex cloud-based computing environment. The ideal candidate is a hands-on, data-driven technical leader, who can personally raise the bar on SRE and observability practices, reduce waste, optimize cloud efficiency, and improve performance, in close partnership with a dedicated SRE/monitoring team and a centralized architecture function. This individual will also serve as a player-coach, passionate about new technologies, mentoring technical teams through complex initiatives while keeping a steady eye on the extensive regulatory/compliance demands on our company (e.g., CIS, NIST).\nPrimary Duties and Responsibilities:\nTo perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each primary duty satisfactorily.\nReports to the Executive Director of Platform Engineering \nManagement Responsibilities:\nManage and develop a team of engineers and managers focused on SRE, observability, and cloud platform engineering, growing and retaining talent \nLead hiring and staffing for the team, including sourcing, interviewing, and selecting engineers and managers to build out the organization \nMeet with team members regularly to provide coaching and feedback on performance \nPerform evaluations and deal effectively with staff problems and corrective actions as needed \nDevelop employee career development plans to assist with team member career growth and development \nManage and participate in the implementation of production changes during defined maintenance windows and support on-call rotation \nServe as a point of escalation within the team for reliability, observability, and platform support issues \nFoster an atmosphere of trust, respect, and high performance while displaying strong ethics and integrity \nManage project and daily work task planning and prioritization, meeting project deadlines while maintaining a high quality of work \nEnsure team compliance with all appropriate OCC policies and procedures, and institute corrective actions to address audit and other regulatory or compliance findings \nOperate within budget; establish and assure adherence to schedules, work plans, and performance requirements \nTechnical & Platform Responsibilities:\nBring deep, hands-on SRE and observability expertise to Platform Engineering, elevating the maturity, rigor, and technical depth of the organization’s observability, monitoring, and reliability practices in close partnership with the dedicated SRE and monitoring team \nServe as a technical authority on reliability engineering, mentoring engineers and managers and raising the bar on SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, incident response, and postmortem discipline across the platform organization \nOwn the definition, governance, and lifecycle of SLOs and SLAs across Platform Engineering, codified as SLO-as-code (e.g., OpenSLO, Sloth, or Nobl9) and version-controlled in the repo rather than only living in a vendor UI \nDrive resilience engineering as a discipline across the platform, including chaos engineering (e.g., AWS FIS, Gremlin) and load/performance testing, to proactively validate and improve system resilience ahead of production incidents \nDeliver golden paths and templates (Terraform modules, Helm charts, pipeline templates) that ship with logging, metrics, tracing, dashboards, alerts, and SLO defaults out of the box, reducing toil and accelerating safe onboarding for engineering teams \nAct as product owner for observability within the platform organization, defining the roadmap and requirements for observability capabilities while the dedicated SRE and monitoring team retains ownership of the underlying tooling and operations \nOwn and drive platform engineering delivery and reliability metrics, including DORA metrics (deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, MTTR), cycle time, and throughput, holding the organization accountable to continuous improvement \nDefine and report on a rounded set of platform and observability metrics: platform adoption (percentage of services on paved roads, service catalog completeness, time to first deploy, onboarding time), observability coverage (percentage of tier-1 services with SLOs, instrumented traces, and runbooks), observability health (MTTD, MTTA, alert actionability ratio, toil percentage, and paging load per engineer), observability economics (telemetry cost per service, cardinality and ingestion growth, and retention tiers), and developer experience (SPACE/DevEx measures alongside DORA) \nChampion the Golden Signals, RED, and USE methods as the platform’s common language for monitoring and alerting \nEnsure audit-grade telemetry practices, including log retention and immutability, PII and sensitive-data scrubbing, and access controls on observability data, mapped to relevant compliance frameworks (e.g., CIS, NIST, and SIFMU-specific resilience and reporting expectations) \nDrive reliability across four core pillars: a data-driven culture (“data junkies”) that uses telemetry and metrics, not intuition, to make decisions; waste reduction through elimination of toil and inefficient processes; cloud measures such as utilization, rightsizing, and FinOps metrics; and continuous performance optimization \nTranslate reliability signals (SLOs, error budgets, incident learnings) surfaced by the SRE organization into concrete cloud platform investments and roadmap priorities \nDrive results in the cloud platform by building a reliable, scalable, secure technology stack in collaboration with engineers and leaders, using leading industry practices \nChampion infrastructure-as-code (IaC) practices across the cloud platform, ensuring provisioning, configuration, and environment management are automated, version-controlled, and consistently applied \nAssess and plan for capacity needs within the cloud platform and forecast accordingly \nCollaborate with the centralized architecture function on platform architecture decisions, ensuring cloud platform engineering execution aligns with broader architectural standards and direction \nImplement and manage initiatives within your assigned area of responsibility with accountability for results and compliance with all controls and security requirements \nLead in the development of technology roadmaps and end-of-life technology plans \nEffectively communicate project and operational service issues to senior management promptly with observations, decisions, and recommendations for corrective measures \nOther duties as assigned \nSupervisory Responsibilities:\nManage a team of engineers and engineering managers focused on SRE, observability, and cloud platform engineering. Full people-management responsibilities, including hiring, performance management, coaching, career development, and corrective action. \n\nQualifications:\nThe requirements listed are representative of the knowledge, skill, and/or ability required. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the primary functions.\n[Required] 5+ years of demonstrated experience leading engineering teams, with an emphasis on developing key talent and cultivating positive, high-performing cultures \n[Required] 10+ years of progressive, hands-on experience in software engineering with an understanding of large-scale computing solutions (primarily AWS), including software design and development, database architectures, IP networking, security, cloud operations, and performance tuning \n[Required] Demonstrated, hands-on expertise building and maturing SRE and observability practices at scale, able to personally raise the technical bar for a dedicated SRE/monitoring team, not just consume their output \n[Required] Demonstrated track record owning the definition and governance of SLOs and SLAs for mission-critical systems, and personally driving resilience engineering practices (chaos engineering, load/performance testing) to validate reliability ahead of incidents \n[Required] Demonstrated track record driving reliability through a data-driven culture, waste/toil reduction, cloud efficiency measures, and performance optimization, treating metrics as the primary lens for every decision \n[Required] Experience defining, instrumenting, and acting on software delivery performance metrics (DORA metrics, cycle time, deployment frequency, lead time, etc.) to drive engineering improvement initiatives \n[Required] Strong consultative, communication, team player, and analytical skills, with the ability to regularly interact between various teams distributed across the US \n[Required] Strong technical team leadership and technical project management skills \n[Required] Relevant experience leading highly technical team members through adopting new technologies while maintaining highly available, mission-critical systems, with a proven track record of success \n[Required] Ability to clearly communicate verbally and in writing to business and technology leaders, architects, developers, and team members \n[Required] Must be able to collaborate effectively with a group of high-performing, technical individuals \n[Required] Experience acting as a product owner, defining roadmap, requirements, and priorities, for a platform capability such as observability, ideally in partnership with a separate team that owns the underlying tooling and operations \n[Required] Experience with architecting, implementing, and maintaining highly available mission-critical environments for 24x7 availability \n[Required] Demonstrated history of working within deadlines and ability to work well under pressure \n[Required] Experience managing work tasks using Agile methodology/scrum desired \n[Preferred] Comfort with ambiguity and demonstrated ability to lead complex programs in a decentralized environment \n[Preferred] Experience working in an environment with a defined production change control process; experience working with audits and compliance or in a regulated environment a plus \n[Preferred] Experience in organizations with a mature, centralized SRE function, avoiding role/scope overlap \nTechnical Skills:\n[Required] Deep expertise in OpenTelemetry, including instrumentation standards, auto-instrumentation, semantic conventions, and the OTel Collector, as the foundation for a vendor-neutral, paved-road instrumentation strategy \n[Required] Hands-on experience with metrics engines and time-series databases, including Prometheus and PromQL, plus scale-out options such as Mimir, Thanos, VictoriaMetrics, or Amazon Managed Prometheus, including cardinality management \n[Required] Hands-on experience with tracing and logging backends such as Tempo/Jaeger, Loki/Elastic/Splunk (Splunk is common in financial services), and AWS X-Ray \n[Required] Experience with Kubernetes and Kafka observability specifically, including EKS metrics, kube-state-metrics, consumer lag, and broker health \n[Required] Experience with alerting and incident tooling such as PagerDuty or Opsgenie, including ServiceNow integration, alert routing, and noise reduction \n[Required] Hands-on experience with SLO-as-code frameworks such as OpenSLO, Sloth, or Nobl9, defining and governing SLOs in the repo rather than only in a vendor UI \n[Required] Experience delivering golden paths and templates (Terraform modules, Helm charts, pipeline templates) tha...","description_format":"text","description_chars":18608,"description_truncated":true,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":10,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["401k plan","Equity","Hybrid work","Parental leave"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":[],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-15T00:56:10Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":75,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.834,"p_room":0.9,"age_days":14,"expected_fill_days":27,"reasons":["conf:4","win:mid"],"computed_at":"2026-10-15T05:46:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":292300,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/theocc-director-platform-engineering","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/theocc-director-platform-engineering.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-15T11:23:49Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":17533,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-16T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":1768531},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=1768531"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Ftheocc-director-platform-engineering"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Ftheocc-director-platform-engineering"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Ftheocc-director-platform-engineering"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/theocc-director-platform-engineering\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Ftheocc-director-platform-engineering"}]}