The Role

As the Head of Platform Engineering, you’ll spearhead the evolution of our scalable, secure, and high-performing platform, driving the infrastructure that fuels our fast-paced startup. Reporting directly to the CTO, you’ll lead a lean team of 1-2 Senior/Intermediate DevOps Engineers and take full ownership of our platform strategy, ensuring it aligns with business objectives and empowers engineering teams.

You’ll remain hands-on, contributing as a staff/principal-level engineer to write code, design architecture, and solve complex technical challenges. You’ll collaborate closely with engineering leads and senior peers across the company to advance strategic priorities, enable business growth, and deliver measurable value. Your mission is to advance our infrastructure, proactively eliminate bottlenecks, and cultivate a world-class DevOps culture

What You’ll Do

Champion Infrastructure Reliability: Conduct gap analyses to strengthen infrastructure, maintain exceptional uptime for critical systems (e.g., APIs, databases), and enhance monitoring systems (e.g., Prometheus, Datadog) to ensure rapid incident detection and resolution.
Lead Strategic Initiatives: Own high-priority infrastructure projects, defining clear roadmaps and fostering accountability to deliver outcomes that drive business success and enable company growth.
Shape Platform Strategy: Develop and execute a forward-thinking infrastructure strategy, leveraging tools like Terraform and Kubernetes to optimize deployments, streamline operations, and support business expansion.
Hands-On Technical Leadership: Actively contribute as a staff/principal-level engineer, writing high-quality code, designing robust architectures, and solving complex technical problems to set a high standard for the team.
Build a High-Performing Team: Mentor and develop your team, recruit top talent, and foster a culture of collaboration, technical excellence, and continuous improvement, guided by meaningful performance metrics.
Drive Security and Compliance: Implement robust security practices (e.g., zero-trust models, DevSecOps) and ensure compliance with standards like SOC 2 and GDPR, maintaining a secure and compliant platform that supports business trust and growth.
Enhance Developer Experience: Optimize deployment pipelines to support frequent, reliable production releases and empower developers with self-service tools and standardized environments to maximize productivity and accelerate feature delivery.
Promote Cost Efficiency: Implement FinOps practices and tools like AWS Cost Explorer to optimize resource allocation, balancing cost, performance, and scalability, particularly during peak crypto transaction volumes, to support financial growth.
Strengthen Incident Management: Enhance incident response and recovery processes, ensuring robust disaster recovery and business continuity plans for seamless operations and business reliability.
Collaborate for Impact: Partner with engineering leads and senior peers to align platform initiatives with company priorities, driving innovation, enabling new business opportunities, and adding measurable value to fuel growth.

What We’re Looking For

Technical Mastery: Extensive experience in platform engineering, with hands-on expertise in cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP), Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform), container orchestration (Kubernetes), and monitoring systems (Prometheus, Datadog). You’re comfortable contributing technically while leading the team.
Proactive Leadership: A proven ability to identify and resolve infrastructure gaps independently, anticipate challenges, and drive impactful improvements with ownership and urgency.
Project Execution: A track record of delivering complex, high-stakes infrastructure projects on time, with strong prioritization, accountability, and cross-functional collaboration skills.
Strategic Vision: The ability to craft and execute long-term platform strategies that align with business goals, enabling scalable growth, reducing technical debt, and adding value to the organization.
Team Building Excellence: Experience mentoring and scaling high-performing DevOps teams, fostering a culture of collaboration, technical growth, and continuous improvement.
Communication Prowess: Exceptional ability to articulate complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders, align teams around shared goals, and drive consensus across engineering and product groups.
Domain Expertise: Experience in the cryptocurrency and centralized exchange (CEX) trading space, with a proven track record of building highly available, resilient services and architectures using tools like Kubernetes to support low-latency, high-throughput systems. Experience with trading systems is a bonus.
Collaborative Impact: Proven ability to partner with engineering leads and senior peers to align platform initiatives with company priorities, driving innovation, enabling new business opportunities, and delivering measurable value to support growth.
Startup Mindset: Thrives in a fast-paced, resource-constrained environment, with a bias for action, adaptability, and a relentless focus on delivering measurable outcomes.

This is a high-impact role for a leader ready to take full ownership of our platform, shape its future, and build a legacy of engineering excellence. If you’re excited to lead transformative initiatives, empower teams, and drive innovation in a crypto-focused startup while collaborating to advance company-wide goals, we want to hear from you.

Head of Platform Engineering

Anywhere in the world

Remote

Senior

Ethena Labs