Director of Engineering - Data Platform

FormativGroup is a company that helps organizations modernize their systems, data, and workflows. They are seeking a Director of Engineering to lead the engineering organization for a data platform aimed at regulated enterprises, focusing on delivery, quality, and team development.

Responsibilities:

• Lead a distributed engineering team across platform/product engineering, connectors, QA, DevOps/infra, AI implementation, data governance, and support
• Own delivery, quality, release discipline, and execution of the technical roadmap
• Install engineering discipline where it's thin: automated testing, QA, CI/CD, release governance, and versioning
• Drive repeatable, perimeter-safe deployments, including containerization, infrastructure-as-code, secure deployment, and SOC 2 readiness
• Partner with the Chief Architect on the connector framework, canonical metadata model, architecture decisions, and product IP
• Build the team: assess current talent, retain the strong, hire the gaps, and align the team plan to the roadmap
• Push practical AI use across coding, review, testing, ops, and engineering productivity

Requirements:

• Engineering leadership experience; you have run and grown teams, managed engineers, owned delivery, and shipped real product
• Hands-on technical depth in data platforms, metadata, backend systems, or platform engineering; enough to earn the respect of strong engineers
• Experience building or rebuilding an engineering function from the ground up, especially in a startup or early-stage environment
• Experience installing testing, QA, CI/CD, release process, or quality practices where they did not already exist
• Experience directly managing distributed or offshore engineering teams across time zones
• Security and compliance literacy for regulated buyers, including SOC 2, audit logging, SSO, data security, or secure deployment
• Strong AI fluency, with concrete examples of how you use AI in your own work and across engineering teams
• Experience taking an early-stage product to enterprise-grade maturity
• Background in regulated industries such as financial services, insurance, healthcare, or government
• Familiarity with perimeter/on-prem deployment, lineage, metadata, graph data, or migration impact-analysis problems