Director, Platform & Architecture

Shopmonkey is seeking a Director of Platform and Architecture to lead our platform evolution. You'll ensure our infrastructure is reliable, scalable, performant, secure, and ready to power the next decade of growth, from core backend systems to our emerging AI layer.  You will empower our product development teams to help accelerate development velocity and maintain a high bar for engineering excellence.

You'll be a key driver in our commitment to delivering the best possible experience for our users and the thousands of auto shops that rely on Shopmonkey every day.

Your responsibilities will include: 

Platform & Architecture Leadership

• Own and evolve our platform architecture across infrastructure, services, and data.
• Champion performance, stability, and scalability as first-class engineering values.
• Design for growth across messaging, scheduling, estimates, time clocks, and AI workflows.

Infrastructure & Scale

• Drive improvements in observability, reliability, and runtime performance.
• Set architectural guardrails and SLAs to support a growing customer base (7,000+ shops).
• Be at the forefront of delivering a highly scalable and performant system as we grow to 10,000 shops and beyond.

Developer Experience

• Lead internal tooling, CI/CD, secrets management, and schema governance.
• Enhance developer velocity by leveraging better abstractions and platform tooling.
• Partner with App and Platform engineers to balance safety and speed across all squads.

AI-Ready Architecture

• Support emerging agentic AI use cases with real-time, secure, retrievable context.
• Build the technical foundation for vector search, semantic retrieval, and RAG pipelines.
• Enable embedding of assistants across Shopmonkey's UI and workflows.

People & Process

• Lead and grow a team of senior platform, infra, and ML infrastructure engineers.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with Product and Application teams.
• Drive architectural clarity and alignment across engineering.
• Build, mentor, and inspire a high-performing team of platform and architecture engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence, continuous learning, and innovation.
• Partner closely with product management, operations, and other engineering teams to understand their needs, gather feedback, and deliver platform solutions that enable their success.
• Stay abreast of emerging technologies and industry trends, evaluating and advocating for their adoption where they can bring significant value to Shopmonkey's platform.

Strategic Leadership

• Define and champion the long-term vision and roadmap for Shopmonkey's platform and architecture, aligning with overall business objectives and product strategy.
• Provide strong technical leadership and guidance across all engineering teams, ensuring adherence to architectural principles, best practices, and security standards for highly performant and scalable systems.
• Drive initiatives to enhance the scalability, responsiveness, availability, and stability of the Shopmonkey platform, addressing challenges related to geographic distribution, peak demand, and data integrity.
• Play a key role in attracting, interviewing, and hiring top-tier engineering talent to grow the platform and architecture team.

DevOps & Automation

• Champion and implement advanced DevOps methodologies, including zero-touch platform provisioning and robust CI/CD pipelines, to optimize our software delivery lifecycle.
• Establish clear KPIs and metrics to measure platform performance, developer experience, and the overall impact of platform initiatives on business outcomes.

We are looking for someone who has: 

• 10+ years in backend/platform/infrastructure roles in high-scale SaaS environments.
• 5+ years in a staff, principal, or engineering leadership role.
• Experience designing resilient distributed systems and scaling critical infrastructure.
• Deep knowledge of:
• CockroachDB or a distributed SQL
• Eventing systems like Synadia NATS or equivalent
• GCP, Kubernetes, and cloud-native deployments
• Go and TypeScript in production
• Track record improving developer experience at scale.
• Strong systems thinking and communication skills — able to drive decisions with clarity.

Nice to have

• Experience with