Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. ClassDojo is a company dedicated to providing every child with an education they love, currently expanding their offerings beyond communication into learning experiences. They are seeking an Engineering Leader to manage the Platform engineering organization, focusing on infrastructure, data, developer experience, and AI tooling, while driving strategic direction and technical excellence across the platform.
Responsibilities
- Own Platform's company-level objectives and the engineering plan that delivers them
- Translate company priorities and product-engineering needs into a platform roadmap, in a way that flows both up and down
- Be responsible for build-vs-buy and architecture-level trade-offs across infrastructure, data, developer experience, and AI tooling; own the technical roadmap and how it balances against the needs of your customers
- Represent Platform and collaborate with cross-functional leadership partners and in engineering-wide leadership conversations
- Coach EMs to a higher bar with clear feedback, growth plans, and direct support
- Drive AI-native development in line with ClassDojo’s engineering practices (flow-based delivery, vertical slicing, WIP discipline, Definition of Done, observability)
- Address performance issues early and clearly; develop managers out of 'fine' performance into great performance
- Be directive when our values, quality bar, or ways of working are at stake
- Treat the product engineering areas as customers: understand their needs, measure adoption and satisfaction, and prioritize accordingly
- Build paved roads and golden paths that teams want to use; earn adoption rather than mandating it
- Take accountability for SLAs/SLOs and incident response across the platform surface
- Make tech-debt and reliability trade-offs on purpose, not by accident
- Support and drive architecture and systems design decisions across infrastructure, data, DevEx, and AI tooling; ensure systems are reliable, maintainable, and operationally ready
- Make build-vs-buy calls deliberately; avoid both not-invented-here and unmanaged sprawl
- Co-own the platform roadmap and quality bar with the product engineering leads who depend on you
- Partner with Security, Ops, Data, and other functions as the platform requires
- Build pragmatic interim solutions that work today and migrate cleanly as platform capabilities mature
Skills
- 2+ years managing managers, with direct reports who were themselves people managers
- 10+ years total in technical roles, with a strong individual-contributor era you can still draw on
- Have owned a platform, infrastructure, data, or developer-productivity area and delivered a measurable outcome (throughput, reliability, cost, or operational safety)
- Have built or evolved platform engineering practices across multiple teams, not just within one, and earned adoption
- Have hired, developed, and managed engineering managers
- Comfortable making and defending build-vs-buy and architecture-level trade-offs across the platform surface; can still reason about code with taste
- Embrace Candor > Harmony: give the hard message early, comfortable with disagreement
- Use LLM-based tools daily and push your teams to adopt them
- Are an excellent written communicator; can articulate strategy and trade-offs clearly in writing
- Experience running infrastructure, data, DevEx, or AI platforms at meaningful scale
- Has built developer platforms that internal engineers genuinely adopted (paved roads, golden paths, internal developer platforms)
- Has used AI-native workflows to materially change how a team designs, ships, and operates, and/or has built AI tooling/platform for other engineers (not just personal use)
- Experience leading a remote-first, distributed engineering team
- Brings a network of high-quality platform/infrastructure engineering talent
Company Overview
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