Associate Director of Engineering, Platform

Named #4 startup in Canada for 2024, Hiive is a fintech/marketplace startup connecting buyers and sellers of stock in venture-backed pre-IPO companies🚀. Thanks to our industry-leading technology and best-in-class capital markets team, we are home to the fastest-growing marketplace for the stock of “unicorns” on the planet. As a profitable and rapidly growing business backed by US venture capital investors, we are seeking to scale our high-performing team.

As the Associate Director of Engineering, Platform, you will be a leader in the engineering organization, responsible for the operational success, technical strategy, and professional growth of our DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), and QA Engineering teams. With a strong foundation in platform engineering, infrastructure, QA automation, and proven people management skills, you'll oversee multiple teams, drive collaboration, and deliver a scalable, reliable, and high-performing platform. You’ll partner closely with engineering leadership to shape and execute strategies, elevate platform maturity, and champion a supportive engineering culture.

In this role, your responsibilities would include:

• Leading, mentoring, and growing teams across DevOps, SRE, and QA Automation, fostering collaboration, innovation, and continuous improvement.

• Overseeing the platform engineering teams, ensuring alignment with organizational goals and maintaining high performance across all initiatives.

• Conducting regular performance evaluations, providing actionable feedback, and supporting professional development and career progression.

• Managing hiring, onboarding, and scaling efforts as the team and organization grow.

• Assisting in scaling the organization by leading hiring efforts and helping to identify improvements in processes and workflows.

• Guiding technical architecture decisions related to platform, infrastructure, automation, and observability, ensuring solutions are scalable, maintainable, and align with industry best practices.

• Reviewing technical designs, providing expert insights for improvement.

• Proactively identifying gaps and advocating for best practices in reliability, security, automation, and developer experience, and advocate for effective solutions.

• Establishing and upholding standards for platform stability, reliability, quality, performance, and security, ensuring robust monitoring, validation, and response practices.

• Championing continuous improvements to developer productivity and platform usability, supporting product engineering teams in achieving their best work.

• Owning incident response processes, including resolution, post-mortems, root-cause analysis, and continuous improvement activities.

Required Skills:

• Experience in senior leadership roles managing DevOps, SRE, or QA automation teams.

• Previous work experience at a scaling startup.

• Proven experience in platform architecture, site reliability engineering, automation, and DevOps methodologies.

• Demonstrated success in defining platform strategy, architecture, reliability, and automation.

• Strong people management skills with proven ability to mentor, grow, and lead engineering teams.

• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to clearly engage both technical teams and non-technical stakeholders across product and engineering.

Preferred Skills:

• Experience with Amazon Web Services (AWS), particularly with strong proficiency in EKS, RDS, and VPC.

• Experience with Kubernetes, Terraform, GitHub Actions for CI/CD pipelines, and Datadog for observability tooling.

• Previous experience working with and optimizing PostgreSQL.

• Experience with Cloudflare and Vercel.

• Experience with Playwright or similar test automation frameworks.

• Strong understanding of security best practices in platform engineering.

• Experience in regulated or high-compliance environments.

• Experience completing SOC2 or similar certifications.

• Experience working with Elixir.

Compensation, Benefits & Perks: 

• Highly competitive salary commensurate with experience and contribution.

• Opportunity to participate in ownership of a rapidly growing early-stage startup through our employee stock option plan.

• Comprehensive 100% employer-paid health and dental premiums, a health and personal spending account.

• A dedicated desk in our Vancouver, BC HQ, in the heart of downtown, with a fridge stocked with healthy snacks and drinks, an onsite gym, and a gorgeous rooftop amenity.

• Enjoy a $20-per-day commuter benefit for every day you work in our Vancouver HQ.

• An engaging social calendar, including bi-weekly catered lunches, bi-weekly “Friday bar,” team workouts, annual summer party, and holiday party, two “onsite” all-team retreats each year, semi-annual team-building events, and Hiive Womens’ Network events.

• Significant opportunities for growth into team leadership and management roles.

• Entrepreneurial culture and a small and dynamic team.

• Sponsorship, immigration, and relocation for exceptional candidates.

Hiive is committed to fostering an inclusive workplace where all individuals have an opportunity to succeed.