Senior Director, Engineering Platform
Talkdesk · Porto, Portugal · 1mo ago
We are looking for a Senior Director of Platform Engineering to lead the strategy, architecture, execution, and organizational development of our Platform Engineering function.
This role is accountable for the foundational capabilities that enable engineering teams to build, deploy, operate, secure, and scale software efficiently and reliably. The Senior Director will own the evolution of our internal developer platform and shared engineering infrastructure, bringing together cloud, Kubernetes, CI/CD, observability, reliability, security, developer experience, and automation into a coherent platform strategy.
The role requires a combination of deep technical judgment, organizational leadership, and platform product thinking, with the ability to operate effectively with senior engineers, engineering leaders, security, architecture, finance, and executive stakeholders.
Key Responsibilities
- Define and own the multi-year Platform Engineering strategy, architecture, and roadmap, aligned with company and engineering objectives.
- Lead the evolution of the Internal Developer Platform, creating paved roads and self-service capabilities that reduce cognitive load and accelerate software delivery.
- Own strategic direction across cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, networking, CI/CD, observability, reliability, Infrastructure as Code, platform security, developer tooling, and FinOps.
- Lead and develop a high-performing organization of Engineering Directors, Managers, Principal/Staff Engineers, and platform teams.
- Establish clear ownership, engineering standards, architectural principles, governance mechanisms, and measurable platform outcomes.
- Drive improvements in developer productivity, delivery performance, reliability, scalability, security, and infrastructure efficiency.
- Ensure platform services are designed for high availability, fault isolation, scalability, disaster recovery, and controlled blast radius.
- Own Security Engineering to embed secure-by-default, policy-as-code, and software supply-chain controls directly into the platform.
- Drive automation of infrastructure, software delivery, operational workflows, change management, and production readiness.
- Define how AI and agentic automation can improve platform operations, developer workflows, incident response, troubleshooting, and engineering productivity.
- Influence broader engineering and architecture strategy, resolving cross-organizational technical and investment trade-offs.
- Own or strongly influence infrastructure investment, capacity planning, cloud cost governance, and platform-related budget decisions.
Required Experience
- Significant leadership experience in Platform Engineering, Infrastructure Engineering, Cloud Engineering, SRE, Developer Productivity, or equivalent large-scale engineering organizations.
- Proven experience leading multiple teams and developing both engineering managers and senior individual contributors.
- Strong technical background in distributed systems, cloud-native architecture, and large-scale production platforms.
- Deep expertise across several of the following: AWS/GCP/Azure, Kubernetes, containers, service networking, Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, observability, SRE, developer platforms, and cloud security.
- Experience designing or operating shared platforms serving many engineering teams and production workloads.
- Demonstrated ability to lead major platform transformations, migrations, and architectural change.
- Ability to engage credibly with Staff and Principal Engineers, and partner with architecture leadership on technical direction and roadmap, while operating effectively with executive leadership.
- Strong judgment in balancing standardization, developer autonomy, reliability, security, cost, and delivery speed.
What Success Looks Like
Success in this role means that:
- Engineers can create, deploy, and operate production services with significantly less friction and specialized infrastructure knowledge.
- Platform capabilities are adopted because they provide a demonstrably better experience than bespoke alternatives.
- Deployment frequency, lead time, change reliability, and recovery times improve.
- Shared infrastructure becomes more resilient, scalable, observable, secure, and cost-efficient.
- Engineering growth does not require proportional growth in platform operational effort.
- Duplicated infrastructure work and organizational toil are systematically removed.
- Platform Engineering is viewed as a strategic engineering capability and internal product, rather than simply an infrastructure operations function.
Talkdesk is pioneering a new era of Customer Experience Automation (CXA), redefining how the world’s most admired brands interact with their customers through AI. Our global team of courageous innovators is customer-obsessed, building AI-first solutions that put empathy, trust, and transparency at the center of every interaction. We foster an inclusive culture where diverse perspectives drive our success and every voice belongs. Combining the stability of a global leader with the agility of a disruptor, Talkdeskers are empowered with the autonomy to drive meaningful impact, while giving back to the communities and environment around us.
Talkdesk has been recognized as a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) and in the G2 Overall Grid® Reports for AI Agents and Contact Center. With seven consecutive years on the Forbes Cloud 100 and multiple AI Breakthrough awards, there has never been a more exciting time to join us as we shape the future of customer experience automation!
Work Environment and Physical Requirements:
Primarily office-environment work, extended periods of sitting or standing, computer-based work. Limited lifting, and equipment usage limited to computer-related equipment (keyboards, mouse, etc.)
The Talkdesk story hinges on empathy and acceptance. It is the shared goal among all Talkdeskers to empower a new kind of customer hero through our innovative software solution, and we firmly believe that the best path to success for our mission is inclusivity, diversity, and genuine acceptance. To that end, we will hire, promote, work along, cheer for, bond with, and warmly welcome into the Talkdesk family all persons without regard to ethnic and racial identity, indigenous heritage, national origin, religion, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, disability, marital status, veteran status, genetic information, or any other legally protected status.