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North is building a next-generation cloud, AI, and data spend management platform. The company provides real-time visibility, control, and automation over digital asset finances, helping companies grow efficiently without wasting time or money. North is Series A-backed and trusted by companies managing complex cloud environments.
You will lead the Platform Engineering team, which owns the foundational layer that all of North's product teams build upon. This includes shared services and libraries, integrations that bring in customer spend data from cloud and AI providers, the data platform behind customer-facing numbers, and the infrastructure and tooling that enable engineers to build, ship, and run the product. Platform engineering done well is a multiplier: it makes the right way to build the easy way.
You will report to the VP of Engineering and work closely with them as the team scales into an organization. The team is already in place with direction set; you'll apply your engineering philosophy to the platform as it grows. The role has two equally important parts: helping the team deliver reliably and own what they build, and providing technical depth. You'll challenge engineers on designs, code, and operations with the experience to back it up.
Key responsibilities include:
- Lead and grow engineers through 1:1s, clear expectations, feedback, and career development
- Work with the VP of Engineering on how Platform Engineering grows from a team into an organization, including identifying when a team is ready for its own manager, then hiring and developing those managers
- Treat the platform as a product for North's engineers; build golden paths, shared patterns, and self-service tooling with guardrails instead of gates
- Turn recurring questions, incidents, and drift into platform improvements that reach existing services
- Hire for platform teams as they grow and help new engineers ramp quickly
- Turn team charters into plans and commitments the rest of North can rely on; raise risks early
- Ensure work starts from clear specs and technical designs, and that teams operate what they ship
- Strengthen reliability practices including on-call, incident response, and observability
- Work with product and product engineering teams so platform work is driven by customer and business needs
- Balance long-term platform investment against near-term product needs and explain tradeoffs clearly
Requirements:
- 10+ years in software engineering, including 5+ years managing engineers and leading multiple teams at once
- Deep, hands-on experience in backend, infrastructure, or data systems, enough to challenge designs and raise the technical bar
- A clear point of view on what platform engineering is for: enabling other teams through standardization, self-service, and guardrails; knowing when a pattern is solid enough to scale and when it's too early to build
- A track record of building teams that hit their commitments without heroics
- Experience running on-call and incident response, and improving reliability over time
- Strong writing and communication with people inside and outside engineering
- Comfort with ambiguity in a growing company and a bias toward simple, durable solutions
- Pragmatic, informed views on how AI coding tools change engineering practice
Nice to have:
- Experience managing managers or growing a team into an organization with its own managers
- Experience with AWS and data platforms at scale
- Experience building golden paths or an internal platform that many teams adopted
- Experience leading integration or data pipeline teams
- Familiarity with FinOps or cloud billing data
