Director of Platform Engineering

Brooklyn, NY or Remote within USA with EST time zone work hours

COMPANY OVERVIEW

Since 2013, our founding mission at StrongArm Technologies has been and remains to keep the world’s Industrial Athletes™ proud, protected and productive. We achieve this through our pioneering FUSE safety wearables and the actionable ergonomic data they provide to individuals and management across numerous job types, industries and operating environments.

The Industrial Athlete™ is the beating heart of everything we represent and strive for here at StrongArm - the essential, frontline workers of the world who put their bodies on the line to perform a critical job function that positively impacts lives beyond their own. But that responsibility doesn’t come without its consequences. Far too often, preventable workplace injuries lead to lost shifts, missed paychecks and threatened livelihoods. That, to us, is unacceptable.

In order to most effectively prevent injuries in a given operational environment, we work closely with each client across many dedicated and leading-edge teams, including client services, data and engineering, IT security and others. Each safety program is tailored to the needs of the workers on the ground and the managers who oversee them, including what types of safety wearables and attachment options will suit them best, and the look and cadence of the safety reports that we’ll provide. The result is an actionable and scalable safety solution that seamlessly becomes part of a facility’s daily routine and is proven to prevent workplace injuries by as much as 64% across hundreds or thousands of Industrial Athletes.

POSITION DESCRIPTION

As the Director of Platform Engineering you will provide technical and managerial leadership of our Platform Engineering team focused on delivering best in class DevOps and cloud production environments.

In this role, you will provide a balance between technical guidance and management of a team of platform engineers overseeing a range of areas. These areas include DevOps, production infrastructure as code, security, and monitoring in cloud server environments. The Platform Engineering team works in conjunction with Data Engineering, Embedded Engineering,  and Software Applications Engineering teams to deliver applications used by Industrial Athletes, front-line managers in the field, corporate clients, insurance carriers, as well as internal teams. 

We are looking for a self-driven leader with exceptional analytical abilities to approach a problem creatively, build and retain top talent, and span the topics of design, build, and monitor our cloud development and production environment. You will work alongside and report directly to the Executive Director.

PRIMARY RESPONSIBILITIES

Technical Management. Identifying and implementing best practices and processes in a growing startup across a complex tech stack and various technical stakeholders. Especially providing a comprehensive management of engineering metrics, goals, and best practices. Provide internal stakeholders insight to make smarter and better informed decisions on roadmap, resourcing, and planning.

• Implement and manage daily operations running the security framework (i.e. ISO 27001/2).
• Implement and manage daily operations running disaster recovery (DR) framework and sustaining the service level agreements (SLA) and objectives (i.e. uptime availability of 99% or higher, recovery point objective (RPO), recovery time objective (RTO)).

Technical Leadership. Set the technical vision, lay out and execute on a strategic roadmap to ensure that StrongArm’s development and production environments are staying ahead of the industry in innovation and cutting-edge technologies.

• Implement and manage daily operations of security information and event management (SIEM) process and tool.
• Implement and manage daily operations running Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework with the major focus on the incident, problem and root-case analysis management reducing overall defects and security vulnerabilities on the production environment.

Technical Delivery. Ensure that rollouts/launches are of the highest quality and delivered on-time to meet stringent, and often inflexible, market timelines.

• Implement and manage daily operations of firmware over the air (FOTA), release management and patch management.
• Address and close all action items and risks coming out of the regular vulnerability scans and penetration testing, and also from regular audits.

Technical Vision. Establishes and directs the strategic long term goals, policies and procedures for an organization's platform engineering team.

• Collaborate with the engineering leadership to develop and fine tune overall technical roadmaps impacting end to end engineering architecture and platform.

Technology Partner. Partner closely with the various engineering leadership teams, particularly Software Applications and technology partners, to ensure that Platform is in lock-step with strategy and absolutely aligned with the Product vision and requirements.

• Ensure to meet internal and external SLAs.

Performs other assignments as necessary per business needs.

Technical Qualifications / Key Skills

• 10+ years professional work experience in cloud, IT infrastructure, platform and security.
• Computer science, engineering or equivalent degree.
• Strong understanding of cloud providers (AWS, GCP). 5+ years of experience in implementing and maintaining AWS.
• 4+ years of experience in security framework (i.e. ISO 27001/2 or similar) implementation and daily operations running the framework.
• 4+ years of experience in implementing and daily operations of SIEM process and tool.
• Certified Information Security Manager (CISM) or similar certifications.
• 4+ years of experience in implementing and daily operations running DR framework and sustaining the service level objectives (i.e. uptime availability of 99% or higher, RPO, RTO).
• ITIL foundation or higher certification.
• 4+ years experience in implementing and daily operations running ITIL framework with the major focus on the incident, problem and root-case analysis management reducing overall defects and security vulnerabilities on the production environment.
• 4+ years of experience to uncover root causes of complex technical problems and provide guidance on solving them, along with experience working across teams and organizations to effect positive engineering outcomes.
• 4+ years experience in implementing and daily operations of FOTA, release management and patch management.
• 4+ years of experience in addressing and closing all action items and risks coming out of the regular vulnerability scans and penetration testing, and also from regular audits.
• Experience working in and scaling ecosystems, businesses, and teams.
• Experience recruiting and managing geographically distributed teams.
• Experience working with CI/CD and DevOps.
• Experience building infrastructure as code (Terraform, Ansible etc).

Bonus Skills

• 12+ years professional work experience in cloud, IT infrastructure, platform and security.
• 4+ years experience in IOT, sensor and wearable business.
• Experience with Serverless environments (Lamba, Cloud Functions, etc).
• Experience working with monitoring tools (Datadog).
• Experience building and maintaining scalable solutions for millions of users.
• Knowledge of Python (Flask, Django).
• Proficiency with relational databases and ORM design (SQLAlchemy, Alembic, etc).
• Understanding of and experience with the five pillars of a well-architected frameworks.
• Experience with both monolithic and microservices architectures.
• Web applications running at scale with docker on kubernetes.
• Optimizing performance at scale.
• Unit and integration testing experience (pytest, junit etc).

StrongArm Technologies is an equal opportunity employer