Director of Platform Engineering

Grata is the leading private market dealmaking platform. We make it easy to find, research, and engage with private companies while powering end‑to‑end M&A business development workflows. Our platform delivers the most comprehensive, accurate, and searchable proprietary data on private companies, their financials, and their owners. 

We are looking for a Director of Platform Engineering to lead the foundational systems that power Grata’s data, AI, and product surfaces. This role owns the platforms our engineering, data, and AI teams build on, including data ingestion and orchestration, internal developer tooling, infrastructure, and the agentic runtime that underpins our next generation of dealmaking workflows. 

You will lead Grata’s Platform team end‑to‑end: setting the multi‑year strategy, owning execution and operational health, and growing the engineers on the team, while partnering with senior leaders across Engineering, Product, Data, and AI to scale Grata’s technical foundation as the business grows. 

Grata is a hybrid company, with in-office collaboration in NYC on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. 

What You’ll Do 

As Director of Platform Engineering, you will be accountable for platform strategy, team health, and engineering execution across the systems that power Grata’s product, data, and AI surfaces. You will partner with senior leaders in Engineering, Product, Data, AI, and Design. 

You will: 

• Set and own a multi‑year vision for Grata’s platform, including infrastructure, orchestration, developer experience, and the agentic runtime; and translate it into a prioritized, funded roadmap. 

• Lead the Platform team directly, including hiring, leveling, performance management, coaching, and career development for the engineers on the team. 

• Own the outcomes of the team’s efforts: successful platform deliveries, incremental value to product‑facing teams, and shared commercial wins. 

• Own the operational health of platform services, including reliability, performance, cost, and security; and the SLAs that product‑facing teams depend on. 

• Drive cross‑functional initiatives that span Platform, Product, Data, and AI, including major architectural evolutions and platform migrations. 

• Balance near‑term delivery with long‑term technical health, making explicit trade‑offs on technical debt, build‑vs‑buy, and platform investment. 

• Partner with Finance and engineering leadership on capacity planning, vendor strategy, and infrastructure spend. 

• Represent Platform in company‑level planning and communicate strategy clearly to technical and non‑technical audiences, up to and including the executive team. 

• Establish and evolve healthy team practices across planning, execution, quality, and operational excellence; and foster a culture of high ownership, psychological safety, and sustainable pace. 

This role is primarily focused on team leadership and platform strategy, with hands‑on technical engagement as needed to guide architecture, unblock the team, and support high‑impact initiatives. 

What You’ll Be Working On 

• Scaling the platform that powers Grata’s M&A business development platform and the agentic workflows built on top of it. 

• Designing and operating the data, orchestration, and runtime systems that ingest, enrich, and serve Grata’s proprietary private‑company data at scale. 

• Building the agent runtime, tool‑use infrastructure, and evaluation systems that AI and product teams use to ship reliable agentic experiences. 

• Investing in developer experience, including CI/CD, observability, environments, and internal tooling, so product teams can ship safely and quickly. 

• Partnering with Product, Data, and AI leadership to align platform investments with where the business is heading next. 

Technical Requirements (Must Have) 

• Multiple years of experience leading platform or infrastructure engineering teams as a director, senior manager, or equivalent. 

• Track record of setting a multi‑quarter platform strategy and delivering against it. 

• Strong technical depth in distributed systems, and in event‑driven and asynchronous architectures. 

• Language‑agnostic technical credibility: comfortable partnering with engineers across modern full‑stack environments to guide architecture and review technical decisions, regardless of the specific language or framework. 

• Experience operating production systems at scale, including reliability, performance, security, and cost; with clear ownership of SLAs and incident response. 

• Demonstrated ability to hire, develop, and retain senior engineers, and to coach engineers and tech leads on growth plans and promotions. 

• Expertise in cloud‑native architectures (AWS, GCP, or Azure), Kubernetes (EKS or similar), and modern observability stacks. 

Technical Experience (Nice to Have) 

• Experience leading teams that build agentic or autonomous workflows, LLM‑powered products, or AI/ML platforms. 

• Background in or familiarity with data engineering, ETL, and large‑scale data processing systems, such as: 

• Databricks or Spark‑based pipelines 

• Kafka, Pulsar, or similar event streaming platforms 

• Airflow, dbt, or workflow orchestration tools 

• Experience with developer platforms, internal tooling, or paved‑road initiatives that meaningfully improved engineering productivity. 

• Background in financial data, M&A, private markets, or similarly data‑heavy domains. 

What We’re Looking For 

We’re looking for a senior engineering leader who brings strong judgment, ownership, and collaboration skills. You may demonstrate strengths in areas such as: 

• Setting a clear technical vision and aligning the team and cross‑functional partners behind it. 

• Anticipating cross‑team constraints and balancing technical risk with delivery goals. 

• Holding the team to a high‑quality bar while reinforcing sustainable execution. 

• Forecasting capacity, negotiating scope, and planning effectively across quarters. 

• Communicating clearly with technical and non‑technical partners, including executive stakeholders. 

• Guiding the team through architectural evolution, platform upgrades, and large migrations. 

• Coaching engineers and tech leads, not just driving delivery, to grow into the next level of their careers. 

• Proactively improving processes, metrics, and engineering effectiveness. 

• Investing in continuous learning and skill development for the team. 

Benefits & Perks 

• Medical, dental, and vision plans with 80% premium coverage for employees 

• Weekly company‑sponsored lunch 

• Unlimited PTO policy 

• Flexible Work Location policy 

• 12 weeks parental leave, 401(k), pre‑tax commuter benefits