Head of Platform Engineering

About Rootly

About the Role

1. Infrastructure Reliability and Scale, building a rock solid, redundant, scalable, operationally mature, and cost efficient infrastructure platform that supports our next tenfold of growth
2. Developer Experience and Velocity, crafting a world class developer experience that enables product engineers to move extremely fast, with safety and confidence, and that shapes how Rootly builds, tests, deploys, and operates
3. This is not a traditional ops role. This is a high leverage engineering leadership position for someone who combines deep technical skill, systems thinking, taste, and the ability to inspire teams to raise the bar. You will define strategy, hire the team, own the roadmap, and build the platform that makes Rootly engineering world class.

What You'll Do

• Own the vision, strategy, and roadmap for Rootly’s infrastructure and developer platform
• Build and lead a high performing Platform Engineering organization that may include SRE, infrastructure, DevEx, and internal tooling
• Establish a culture where reliability, performance, and developer experience are non negotiables
• Act like an owner, spotting problems early, mobilizing teams, and driving solutions from concept to completion

• Architect a highly available, redundant, and scalable infrastructure foundation
• Lead capacity planning, cost management, performance tuning, and long term infrastructure scaling
• Drive operational maturity through infrastructure as code, declarative infrastructure, configuration management, and repeatable automation

• Enable product engineers to move extremely quickly by optimizing local dev environments, ephemeral cloud environments, fast CI and CD, and reliable canaries
• Provide tooling that abstracts infrastructure complexity and removes friction from development
• Ensure every engineer can ship confidently, frequently, and safely

• Own platform wide SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets and use them to drive prioritization
• Oversee observability tooling, monitoring, alerting, and incident response processes
• Partner with product engineering teams to ensure services meet reliability and performance goals and to improve runbooks and postmortems

• Drive high quality execution with urgency while balancing long term bets with tactical wins
• Raise the bar and inspire engineers to think bigger, move faster, and deliver exceptional results
• Collaborate closely with Product, Engineering, and leadership to align platform investments with company strategy
• Recruit, mentor, and develop top tier platform engineers and create a culture of excellence

What We Are Looking For

• 10+ years in platform, infrastructure, SRE, or DevOps roles, with increasing leadership responsibility
• Experience leading platform or SRE teams, including hiring, mentoring, and building culture
• Deep expertise with cloud infrastructure, AWS preferred, distributed systems, scaling, and redundancy
• Proven experience designing or operating high scale production systems and delivering operational maturity
• Strong background in observability, performance tuning, and scaling strategies
• Comfortable writing production grade software to solve infrastructure problems, Ruby or Go is a plus
• Strong architectural judgement and systems thinking that anticipates scaling pain before it becomes real

• Experience delivering DevEx tooling that materially improved developer velocity
• Experience navigating startup to hypergrowth transitions and scaling infra and teams accordingly
• High standards for taste and craftsmanship in platform engineering
• Exceptional communicator, able to translate complex technical decisions for technical and non technical audiences
• Bias toward action with the judgement to optimize versus ship at the right times

• Built a small but elite Platform team with clear ownership and high morale
• Dramatically accelerated engineering velocity with faster deploys, shorter tests, and fewer bottlenecks
• Established high availability infrastructure with clear SLOs and stronger reliability across the board
• Delivered developer tooling that makes engineering faster and more enjoyable
• Positioned Rootly to scale tenfold in customers, traffic, and complexity

Why Rootly?

• Competitive compensation and early equity in a fast-growing, venture-backed company.
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• 3 weeks of vacation, plus unlimited sick and mental health days, and a company-wide end-of-year shutdown to recharge.
• $500 stipend for home office setup.
• Unlimited token usage and access to AI tools
• A fast-moving, high-impact environment where your leadership and ideas directly shape the future of the company.