The Director of Platform Engineering will lead and unify SRE and DevOps teams, oversee CI/CD pipelines, and drive cloud-native practices while building a high-performing engineering team.
About Starcompliace
StarCompliance is on a mission to make compliance simple and easy. Trusted globally by enterprise financial institutions, the user-friendly STAR platform empowers organizations to achieve regulatory compliance while safeguarding their integrity and business reputations. Through a customizable, 360-degree view of employee activity, the STAR software enables firms to automate the detection and resolution of potential areas of conflict while streamlining daily workflows and increasing efficiency.
Role
The Director of Platform Engineering will establish and lead StarCompliance’s new Platform Engineering function, unifying SRE and DevOps capabilities currently spread across multiple teams. This role combines strategic ownership with hands-on technical contribution, building a high-performing team responsible for the platform foundations that enable fast, reliable, and secure software delivery across our SaaS products.
Reporting to the VP of Engineering, you will define and mature Star’s internal engineering platform - standardized CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, observability, operational tooling, reliability practices, and developer experience. You will hire, mentor, and grow a team of Platform Engineers while actively contributing to design discussions, automation work, and complex technical problem-solving.
You will partner closely with the Architecture team to translate cloud and platform strategy into executable engineering capabilities and collaborate with SecOps to ensure secure-by-design practices are built into pipelines and platform tooling. Your work will reduce cognitive load for product teams, improve reliability and release velocity, and support Star’s transition toward a fully modern, cloud-native PaaS/SaaS delivery model.
Success in this role means building a cohesive Platform Engineering organization, establishing a unified platform used across all engineering teams, and delivering measurable improvements in reliability, scalability, and delivery efficiency - while remaining hands-on and deeply engaged in the technical evolution of Star’s software platform.
Responsibilities - Platform Engineering Leadership & Team Building
- Platform Engineering Leadership & Team Building
- Establish, hire, and lead StarCompliance’s new Platform Engineering function, bringing together SRE and DevOps capabilities currently distributed across engineering teams.
- Coach, mentor, and develop Platform Engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence, autonomy, and continuous learning in alignment with “The StarCompliance Way.”
- Define and communicate the vision for a modern, cloud-native engineering platform that increases velocity, reliability, and consistency across all product teams.
- CI/CD, Release, and Deployment Engineering
- Lead the design, build, and governance of standardized CI/CD pipelines using Azure DevOps, ensuring secure, repeatable, and scalable software delivery across our SaaS platform.
- Define release orchestration patterns, including automated gating, zero-downtime deployments, rollback processes, and environment promotion workflows.
- Embed test automation, SRE practices, and telemetry into pipelines to improve delivery confidence and operational reliability.
- Platform Architecture & Collaboration
- Partner with the Architecture team to evolve Star’s cloud platform, ensuring alignment on patterns, standards, and long-term technical strategy.
- Translate architectural direction into executable platform capabilities, tooling, automation, and operational processes.
- Work closely with Engineering squads to ensure platform services meet developer needs while reducing cognitive load and removing delivery bottlenecks.
- SRE, Reliability, and Observability
- Define and implement SRE practices such as SLIs/SLOs, performance baselines, incident response processes, and error budgets.
- Oversee modern observability tooling, ensuring rich telemetry, dashboards, alerting, and actionable insights that improve product reliability.
- Drive continuous improvement through post-incident reviews, resilience engineering, and proactive identification of risks in production systems.
- Cloud Platform, PaaS, and Infrastructure Automation
- Lead the adoption and evolution of Azure cloud services, PaaS components, and infrastructure automation aligned to Star’s SaaS platform roadmap.
- Establish patterns and templates that ensure secure-by-design delivery, working closely with SecOps to embed security controls into the platform.
- Champion automation-first principles across infrastructure, environments, and operational workflows.
- Technical Contribution & Hands-On Delivery
- Remain actively involved in hands-on engineering where appropriate - reviewing code, contributing to automation, prototyping solutions, and supporting critical incidents.
- Drive the adoption of AI-enabled engineering practices to increase developer productivity, improve reliability, and accelerate delivery.
Skills and Experience
- Leadership & Team Development
- Proven experience leading and developing high-performing SRE, DevOps, or Platform Engineering teams within a SaaS or cloud-native environment.
- Experience hiring, structuring, and scaling an engineering function from the ground up.
- Strong interpersonal and communication skills, capable of influencing architecture, product, engineering, and executive stakeholders.
- Technical Expertise
- Deep expertise in designing and operating CI/CD pipelines using Azure DevOps (preferred) or equivalent tooling such as GitHub Actions or GitLab.
- Strong understanding of cloud-native hybrid architectures including single and multi-tenancy, PaaS services, infrastructure automation, and scalable deployment practices.
- Hands-on engineering experience in at least one enterprise-grade programming language (C#, Java, Python) and the ability to contribute directly when required.
- Experience with observability platforms, SRE practices, telemetry pipelines, dashboards, and alerting systems.
- Cloud & Platform Engineering
- Significant experience in Azure or another major cloud provider, with strong knowledge of modern cloud services, identity, networking fundamentals, and environment configuration.
- Experience building internal developer platforms, platform tooling, or standardised release frameworks across multiple product teams.
- Strong understanding of modern DevOps and SRE principles, including incident response, post-mortems, automation, SLIs/SLOs, and resilience engineering.
- Security & Governance Awareness
- Familiarity with secure-by-design engineering practices and integrating security controls into CI/CD and cloud platform workflows.
- Ability to work effectively with SecOps teams without direct ownership of security operations.
- Problem Solving & Delivery
- Demonstrated experience leading complex cloud, platform, or modernisation initiatives in a fast-paced SaaS environment.
- Ability to evaluate requirements, recommend pragmatic solutions, and drive cross-team outcomes.
- Strong analytical, diagnostic, and troubleshooting skills, with a bias for automation and continuous improvement.
Minimum Qualifications
Degree or Equivalent
StarCompliance Background Checks
All positions require pre-employment screening due to employees potentially having access to highly sensitive and confidential information involving finance and compliance; candidates must be trustworthy and have a heightened sensitivity to protecting confidential financial, professional information. To be eligible for employment with StarCompliance, candidates must undergo a rigorous background investigation with checks including, but not limited to, criminal record history, consumer credit, employment history, qualifications, and education checks.
Equal Opportunity Employer Statement
We prohibit discrimination and harassment of any kind based on race, sex, religion, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, genetic information, pregnancy, gender identity or expression, marital/civil union/domestic partnership status, veteran status or any other protected characteristic as outlined by country, state, or local laws.
This policy applies to all employment practices within our organisation, including hiring, recruiting, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, leave of absence, compensation, benefits, training, and apprenticeship. StarCompliance makes hiring decisions based solely on qualifications, merit, and business needs at the time. For more information, please request a copy of our Equal Opportunities Policy.
Top Skills
Azure Devops
C#
Ci/Cd
Java
Python
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