Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Gap Inc. is seeking a Senior Director, Platform Engineering to lead the strategy, development, and operations of its enterprise cloud platform across Azure and GCP. The role owns the Kubernetes-based Continuous Delivery Platform, infrastructure automation, observability, API gateway and service mesh capabilities, FinOps, and the growth of a high-performing platform engineering organization.
Responsibilities
- Define and execute the multi-cloud platform strategy across Azure and GCP, ensuring architectural consistency, security, and scalability
- Lead the design and evolution of shared platform services — networking, identity, compute, storage, and observability — as self-service capabilities for product engineering teams
- Own the API gateway and service mesh layer (Istio), enabling secure, observable, and resilient service-to-service communication across the platform
- Evaluate emerging cloud-native technologies and make build-vs-buy decisions that balance innovation with operational sustainability
- Partner with Security, Architecture, and Compliance teams to embed governance and policy-as-code into every layer of the platform
- Own and evolve the enterprise Continuous Delivery Platform built on Kubernetes, enabling teams to build, test, ship, and schedule workloads reliably
- Drive adoption of modern CI/CD pipelines, container orchestration, GitOps workflows, and progressive delivery practices (canary, blue-green, feature flags)
- Champion developer experience (DevEx) as a first-class product — reducing friction from code commit to production through self-service tooling, golden paths, and internal developer portals
- Establish and track platform adoption metrics (deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, MTTR) aligned with DORA benchmarks
- Lead the infrastructure-as-code practice using Terraform, ensuring all cloud resources are provisioned, versioned, and managed through automated, repeatable pipelines
- Drive the DevOps culture and toolchain strategy — standardizing on modern practices for configuration management, secrets management, service mesh, and policy enforcement
- Build and maintain reusable Terraform modules, landing zones, and account/project vending solutions that accelerate onboarding of new workloads and teams
- Ensure infrastructure changes flow through the same CI/CD rigor as application code, with automated testing, drift detection, and compliance checks
- Define and own the enterprise observability strategy — ensuring comprehensive monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting across all platform services and application workloads
- Lead the implementation and standardization of monitoring toolchains (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Azure Monitor, Google Cloud Operations Suite) to provide real-time visibility into system health and performance
- Own the platform's event streaming and messaging infrastructure built on Apache Kafka, enabling reliable, high-throughput, real-time data pipelines across the organization
- Establish SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets as the foundation for reliability decisions, partnering with product engineering teams to drive a culture of proactive incident prevention
- Ensure distributed tracing and service dependency mapping are in place across the Istio service mesh, enabling rapid root cause analysis during incidents
- Lead the strategy and operations of the Istio service mesh and API gateway layer, providing traffic management, mutual TLS, rate limiting, and fine-grained access control across microservices
- Define and enforce API lifecycle management standards — versioning, deprecation policies, schema governance, and developer documentation
- Partner with application teams to optimize service-to-service communication patterns, latency, and resilience through circuit breaking, retries, and intelligent routing
- Ensure API gateway and mesh configurations are managed as code, fully integrated into the CI/CD pipeline with automated canary analysis and rollback
- Establish and lead the FinOps practice, creating visibility, accountability, and optimization of cloud spend across Azure and GCP
- Implement cost allocation frameworks (tagging, showback/chargeback) that tie cloud consumption to business units, products, and teams
- Partner with Finance, Procurement, and Engineering leadership to forecast cloud budgets, manage committed-use agreements, and identify savings opportunities
- Build dashboards and reporting cadences that keep cloud costs transparent from engineering teams to executive leadership
- Build, mentor, and scale a high-performing platform engineering organization spanning SRE, DevOps, cloud infrastructure, observability, and FinOps disciplines
- Foster a culture of ownership, continuous improvement, and blameless incident learning
- Attract and retain top engineering talent by creating an environment of technical excellence, psychological safety, and meaningful career growth
- Establish clear team charters, on-call rotations, SLOs, and operational readiness standards
- Serve as the primary technology leader for cloud platform and delivery infrastructure, communicating strategy, roadmaps, and trade-offs to executive leadership
- Partner with product engineering, data engineering, security, and enterprise architecture teams to align platform capabilities with business priorities
- Coordinate transparent, timely communications on platform health, incidents, capacity, and upcoming changes
- Prepare and deliver executive summaries covering platform performance, cost trends, reliability metrics, and strategic initiatives
Skills
- * 15+ years of progressive experience in software engineering, infrastructure, or platform engineering, with at least 5 years in senior leadership roles managing managers
- * Deep hands-on background in cloud platforms (Azure and/or GCP required; multi-cloud experience strongly preferred)
- * Proven experience building and operating Kubernetes-based platforms at enterprise scale, including container orchestration, Istio service mesh, and workload scheduling
- * Strong expertise in API gateway architecture, service mesh (Istio), traffic management, and microservices communication patterns
- * Demonstrated experience with enterprise observability and monitoring platforms (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or equivalent), including SLI/SLO frameworks and incident management
- * Hands-on knowledge of event streaming and messaging platforms, particularly Apache Kafka, for building real-time data pipelines at scale
- * Strong command of infrastructure-as-code practices with Terraform and modern DevOps toolchains (CI/CD, GitOps, observability, secrets management)
- * Demonstrated success standing up or maturing a FinOps function, including cost optimization, tagging strategies, and cloud financial governance
- * Track record of building high-performing engineering teams with a culture of ownership, operational excellence, and continuous delivery
- * Excellent executive communication skills — able to translate complex technical strategies into business outcomes for non-technical stakeholders
- * Experience driving platform adoption and developer experience as an internal product, using metrics and feedback loops to guide investment
- * Strong knowledge of DORA metrics, SRE principles, and modern reliability practices
- * Kubernetes certifications (CKA, CKAD) or Terraform certifications (HashiCorp Certified)
- * Cloud certifications in Azure (Solutions Architect Expert) and/or GCP (Professional Cloud Architect)
- * FinOps Certified Practitioner or equivalent experience with the FinOps Foundation framework
- * Experience with platform engineering tooling such as Backstage, Crossplane, ArgoCD, or Flux
- * Certified Kafka expertise or significant production experience operating Kafka/Confluent at scale
- * Experience with Istio certification or advanced service mesh architectures in multi-cluster environments
- * Background in retail, e-commerce, or high-transaction-volume environments
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