Director, Developer Platform & Experience

About the role

Motive is moving to an AI-driven development lifecycle. Agents that plan, generate, test, review, and help operate our systems — with engineers directing the work rather than typing all of it — are where software engineering at Motive is going. That direction is set. What we need now is a leader to build it.

We are hiring a Director of Developer Platform & Experience to own that execution and the platform underneath it. This role owns Motive's internal developer ecosystem end to end: developer experience, developer infrastructure, build and CI/CD systems, and the testing frameworks that let hundreds of engineers move quickly without breaking things. It also owns AI-DLC in practice — the tooling, cloud agent infrastructure, evaluation practice, and governance that determine whether agentic development actually makes us faster or just makes us noisier.

Our engineering organization spans North America, Europe, and Asia, across a Rails monolith, Go services, mobile, and embedded systems. How fast and how confidently that organization ships is one of our most important business levers.

This is a builder's leadership role, not a strategy role. You will inherit real systems and real teams, and be measured on whether engineers at Motive ship faster, with higher confidence, and with less friction than they did the quarter before.

The mandates

1. AI-driven development — make agentic development a governed, measured, everyday part of how Motive builds software.
2. Cloud-based agentic development infrastructure — build the substrate that lets agents run in the cloud, in parallel, safely.
3. Developer experience — make the inner loop fast and the right path the easy path.
4. Developer infrastructure — make build, CI/CD, and release systems fast, reliable, and cost-aware at scale.

The defining challenge: agentic development in the cloud

Most AI coding adoption stops at the laptop — one engineer, one agent, one local checkout. That ceiling is low, and moving past it is the signature technical challenge of this role.

You will build the infrastructure that runs agentic development in the cloud: ephemeral, reproducible, isolated environments where many agents work concurrently on real Motive codebases, run real tests against real dependencies, and open real pull requests — without an engineer babysitting a terminal, and without compromising security or blowing up spend.

This is a hard distributed-systems and platform problem, not a tooling procurement exercise. Done right, engineers stop being throughput-bound by their own machines and start operating as reviewers and directors of parallel work. We want a leader who finds that problem exciting and has the platform depth to solve it.

What you'll own

AI-driven development lifecycle (AI-DLC)

• Translate Motive's AI-driven development direction into an executable multi-year plan — how agents plan, generate, test, review, and operate under human direction, what "human in the loop" means at each stage, and where engineers spend their time as a result.
• Evaluate, select, and roll out AI developer tools (coding agents, code review, test generation, incident investigation, documentation) and build the internal scaffolding — context, MCP servers, evals, guardrails — that makes them effective on Motive's actual codebases rather than on a demo repo.
• Stand up a rigorous LLM and agent evaluation practice: benchmarks, offline and online evals, quality and cost regression tracking, and a defensible model and vendor selection process that survives a fast-moving landscape.
• Own the governance layer with Security, Legal, and Platform: acceptable use, code provenance and licensing, secrets and data handling, and audit trails for AI-generated changes.
• Define and report the adoption and impact metrics that tell us whether this is actually working — n