About the Role

Play a critical role in shaping the foundation of Kard’s data, DevOps, and security platforms. As Director, Platform, you will empower the entire business with robust, efficient, and secure systems that support our fast-growing company. Reporting directly to the VP of Product and Engineering, you will collaborate with talented senior engineers and leaders with experience at startups and companies like AWS, HashiCorp, Reddit, Spotify, Heroku, and more. Together, you will build and scale Kard’s technical foundation while enabling teams across the company to deliver innovative, scalable solutions.

This is a high-impact role with significant visibility, offering you the opportunity to grow your team, influence technical strategy, and make lasting contributions to Kard’s success.

Responsibilities

• Lead platform team to enhance developer experience, efficiency, and reliability, while ensuring scalability and security.
• Oversee DevSecOps, and FinOps practices and tools, including CI/CD, IaC, and observability, to streamline workflows and align with business goals.
• Guide data engineering, analytics engineering, and ML initiatives, operationalizing models for personalization, transaction enrichment, experimentation, and other key use cases.
• Champion cross-functional collaboration to ensure platform investments deliver measurable business value, drive automation, and support lean growth strategies.
• Establish and promote best practices for security, data privacy, and compliance with SOC2 type 2, PCI, and other standards.
• Mentor and manage a growing team of engineers, fostering a culture of inclusion, collaboration, and continuous learning.
• Serve as a founding leader in the DevOps guild, collaborating with product engineers and other stakeholders to advance expertise across the entire R&D organization.
• Travel to attend annual and semi-annual company meetings, and as needed by your job responsibilities
• Additional duties as assigned

Desired Skills

• Strong experience in platform engineering and DevOps practices, with additional expertise in data systems and/or ML operations.
• Proven ability to lead and scale teams, including mentoring, hiring, and fostering collaboration.
• Proficiency in modern platform tools and practices, including AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD systems, and observability tools like Datadog.
• Familiarity with data engineering technologies such as SQL, Python, dbt, Databricks, or equivalent platforms.
• Experience in security and compliance audits, and familiarity with trust management platforms such as Vanta.
• Experience with cost platforms such as Vantage.
• Strategic thinking with the ability to align technical initiatives with business goals and deliver measurable outcomes.
• Excellent communication skills for cross-functional collaboration and stakeholder management.
• Commitment to fostering a supportive, inclusive, and innovative team culture.
• Ability to work 8 hours during core U.S. business hours between 7 a.m. to 7 p.m
• Ability to be on camera, distraction-free, and actively participating during meetings