Director of Engineering Platform – Cloud Infra Leadership in Columbus

Dispel builds network isolation and access infrastructure for critical industries, where a breach or unexpected downtime is an operational failure with real-world consequences. Our customers include critical infrastructure operators, defense contractors, and industrial enterprises that demand zero-trust security, strict compliance, and rock-solid availability.

The Director of Engineering – Platform owns the foundation upon which everything at Dispel runs. This role leads the engineering teams and technical leaders responsible for cloud environments, hybrid and edge deployments, infrastructure-as-code, network architecture, observability, release infrastructure, and cloud cost efficiency.

This is a hybrid leadership role. The person in this role must be able to set a multi-year infrastructure strategy, lead managers and senior technical leaders, and align platform investments to business and compliance outcomes. They must also maintain deep technical awareness of the stack and be willing to step in directly when needed through prototyping, architectural spiking, deep debugging, or incident analysis.

Responsibilities

Strategic Platform Architecture & Cloud Economics

• Define and execute the roadmap for Dispel's platform infrastructure across multi-tenant SaaS, dedicated customer environments, and hybrid or edge deployment models.
• Own infrastructure architecture decisions across cloud platforms, networking, deployment systems, and shared runtime services.
• Drive cloud infrastructure economics, including compute, storage, and network efficiency, with clear cost guardrails embedded into engineering workflows.
• Partner with Security and Compliance to ensure platform architecture supports auditability, hardening, and regulatory obligations as built-in controls rather than manual processes.
• Set standards for observability, reliability, incident response, recovery expectations, and operational readiness across the engineering organization.

Delivery & People Leadership

• Lead engineering managers and senior technical leads across platform, DevOps, and infrastructure-focused teams.
• Lead engineering managers and senior technical leads across platform, DevOps, and infrastructure-focused teams.
• Set a high bar for system design, technical rigor, operational ownership, and written communication.
• Partner closely with product engineering, Security, Compliance, and executive leadership to ensure platform priorities unblock product development rather than creating friction.
• Design effective team structures, ownership boundaries, and on-call models that balance speed, quality, and sustainability.
• Raise the bar for hiring, leveling, and growth for platform, infrastructure, and systems engineering talent.

Hands-On Solution Delivery & Technical Unblocking

• Build or guide proofs of concept, reference implementations, and technical spikes for novel infrastructure challenges.
• Step directly into high-severity incidents, deep networking failures, infrastructure bottlenecks, or complex refactors when additional technical leadership is required.
• Review and shape infrastructure code, including Terraform modules, automation, and deployment tooling.
• Identify sources of developer friction in CI/CD, local development, release workflows, or environment provisioning and drive practical tooling improvements.
• Model strong use of modern AI-assisted engineering tools to improve speed, documentation quality, and repeatable operational work.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of engineering leadership experience, including leading multiple infrastructure or platform teams and managing engineering managers or equivalent senior leaders.
• Deep technical background in platform, infrastructure, systems, or cloud engineering.
• Ability to evaluate and discuss complex systems trade-offs and to read or write production infrastructure code in technologies such as Terraform, Python, Go, or shell.
• Demonstrated experience operating high-security, high-availability cloud environments in AWS, Azure, or both.
• Experience with networking, hybrid deployment models, VPNs, firewalls, routing, DNS, or comparable systems concerns.
• Proven experience managing infrastructure cost efficiency and making architecture decisions with clear economic trade-offs.
• Strong written communication skills in remote-first environments, including architecture proposals, ADRs, postmortems, and executive updates.
• Comfort using AI-assisted development and analysis tools as part of day-to-day leadership and technical work.
• US work authorization required. Dispel requires comprehensive background checks for all employees.

Bonus Points

• Experience with federal, defense, or enterprise compliance frameworks such as FedRAMP, NIST 800-53, SOC 2, ISO/IEC 27001, or DISA STIGs.
• Experience with observability platforms and telemetry pipelines across logs, metrics, and traces.
• Experience with container security, OS hardening, and policy-based CI/CD controls.
• Track record of leading major infrastructure transformations such as cloud migrations, zero-downtime regional expansion, or modernization of legacy IaC.

Benefits

• Base salary: $185,000–$220,000
• 401(k) with company match
• Generous paid time off and holidays
• Performance bonus and equity eligible
• Remote work
• Medical, vision, dental insurance