# Director of Engineering, Platform (Runtime & Stateful Systems)
**Company:** [Sentry](https://scaleengineer.com/companies/sentry)
Director of Engineering, Platform role at Sentry leading multiple engineering teams responsible for runtime and stateful systems including OLTP/OLAP databases, real-time compute, stream processing, blob storage, and distributed caching. This mission-critical position requires 12+ years of backend/platform engineering experience with director-level leadership expertise in designing and operating large-scale distributed systems, strong architectural judgment, and a proven track record of driving complex cross-functional initiatives that impact business outcomes.
**Role:** Director of Engineering
**Seniority:** Director
**Locations:** San Francisco, California
**Salary:** 300000–450000 USD
[Apply](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sentry/b7c17591-c9f1-449a-b0c1-39f2d6ff650e)
Canonical: https://scaleengineer.com/jobs/sentry/director-of-engineering-platform-runtime-stateful-systems
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## Responsibilities

- Lead Engineering Teams: Direct multiple engineering teams and Staff engineers responsible for runtime and stateful systems supporting Sentry, Seer, and downstream products. Establish clear ownership structures, define technical accountability, and ensure teams operate with alignment around shared objectives.
- Set Technical Vision and Strategy: Define the technical vision and architectural strategy across OLTP/OLAP databases, real-time compute, stream processing, blob storage, and distributed caching systems. Identify opportunities to evolve the platform architecture as business scale and product requirements evolve, ensuring infrastructure can support both current and future product capabilities.
- Drive Architectural Evolution: Lead significant architectural changes and technical initiatives across multiple distributed systems domains. Make informed tradeoffs between scalability, reliability, performance, cost, and operational complexity. Establish decision-making frameworks that enable teams to navigate technical ambiguity with confidence.
- Provide Technical Leadership: Work closely with senior engineers and technical staff to evaluate architectural decisions, challenge technical assumptions, and establish clear technical direction. Engage deeply in system design discussions, code reviews of critical components, and technical decision documentation to maintain engineering excellence standards.
- Own Operational Excellence: Ensure mission-critical systems maintain high reliability, scalability, and performance standards. Establish operational metrics, monitoring, alerting, and incident response procedures. Drive continuous improvement in system observability, failure prevention, and recovery capabilities.
- Build and Develop Engineering Leaders: Hire, mentor, and develop engineering managers and senior technical leaders. Create career development paths, establish leadership principles, and raise the technical bar across the organization. Foster a culture where engineers take ownership, collaborate effectively, and continuously improve their capabilities.
- Foster Engineering Culture: Build a culture of engineering excellence characterized by technical accountability, continuous improvement, knowledge sharing, and psychological safety. Establish engineering standards, code quality practices, and architectural review processes that scale with team growth.
- Cross-Functional Partnership: Partner with Platform, Infrastructure, and Product leadership to align priorities, navigate technical ambiguity, and deliver complex cross-functional initiatives. Communicate technical constraints and opportunities to product teams, influence architecture decisions based on business priorities, and collaborate on roadmap planning.
- Anticipate Infrastructure Needs: Proactively identify evolving product and infrastructure needs through collaboration with product teams and analysis of usage patterns. Build new platform capabilities that enable faster product development, propose improvements to existing systems that increase efficiency and reduce costs, and position infrastructure ahead of business demands.

## Requirements

### education

- {"name":"Computer Science or Related Field","description":"Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related technical discipline. Advanced degrees or equivalent professional experience demonstrating mastery of computer science fundamentals is valued"}

### technical

- {"name":"OLTP Database Expertise","description":"Deep technical expertise in online transaction processing systems including relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL), schema design, transaction semantics, indexing strategies, and scaling distributed OLTP architectures"}
- {"name":"OLAP Database Expertise","description":"Advanced knowledge of online analytical processing systems including columnar databases, data warehousing architectures, query optimization, and handling massive analytical workloads at scale"}
- {"name":"Real-Time Compute and Stream Processing","description":"Strong expertise in stream processing platforms, real-time data pipelines, exactly-once semantics, windowing operations, and handling high-throughput event processing at scale"}
- {"name":"Blob and Object Storage","description":"Deep understanding of distributed blob storage systems, object storage architectures, consistency models, and designing storage solutions that handle large-scale data ingestion and retrieval"}
- {"name":"Distributed Caching","description":"Expert-level knowledge of distributed caching systems, cache invalidation strategies, consistency patterns, and optimizing system performance through effective caching architectures"}
- {"name":"Distributed Systems Design","description":"Strong foundational understanding of distributed systems concepts including consensus algorithms, eventual consistency, fault tolerance, CAP theorem tradeoffs, and designing resilient systems"}

### experience

- {"name":"Backend and Platform Engineering","description":"12+ years of progressive experience in backend, platform, or infrastructure engineering with proven expertise designing and operating large-scale distributed systems handling billions of transactions or massive data volumes"}
- {"name":"Director-Level Leadership","description":"Director-level engineering management experience or equivalent senior engineering leadership role overseeing multiple teams at comparable scale and complexity, demonstrating success in growing organizations and developing technical talent"}
- {"name":"Distributed Systems Operations","description":"Significant hands-on and leadership experience with mission-critical infrastructure, demonstrating deep understanding of reliability engineering, scalability patterns, performance optimization, and operational efficiency in production environments"}
- {"name":"Architectural Change Management","description":"Demonstrated track record driving significant architectural changes through the full lifecycle from evaluation of technical tradeoffs, establishing strategic direction, planning implementation, and leading execution across teams"}
- {"name":"Complex Initiative Execution","description":"Proven ability to lead complex cross-functional engineering initiatives from strategy definition through execution, with measurable technical impact or significant business outcomes"}
- {"name":"Team Development and Hiring","description":"Experience building high-performing organizations through strategic hiring, developing engineering managers and senior technical talent, and establishing scalable processes for talent acquisition and career development"}

## Skills

### required

- {"name":"Distributed Systems Architecture","description":"Ability to design, evaluate, and reason about complex distributed systems including tradeoffs between consistency, availability, partition tolerance, and operational complexity"}
- {"name":"Technical Judgment and Decision-Making","description":"Strong judgment in making technical decisions under uncertainty, weighing multiple factors including scalability, reliability, performance, cost, and team velocity"}
- {"name":"Strategic Technical Leadership","description":"Ability to translate business objectives into technical strategy, establish architectural direction that aligns multiple teams, and influence through technical expertise rather than authority"}
- {"name":"People Leadership and Development","description":"Proven capability in hiring, coaching, and developing engineering managers and senior technical leaders, establishing career paths, and building high-performing organizations"}
- {"name":"Executive Communication","description":"Ability to articulate complex technical concepts to diverse audiences including executives, clearly communicate tradeoffs, influence stakeholders through strong reasoning and data"}
- {"name":"Cross-Functional Collaboration","description":"Strong partnership skills in working effectively with Product, Infrastructure, and other platform teams, navigating ambiguity through collaboration, and aligning organizations around shared goals"}
- {"name":"Operational Excellence","description":"Deep understanding of production systems, reliability engineering practices, incident management, observability, monitoring, and driving continuous operational improvements"}
- {"name":"Strategic Thinking","description":"Ability to think beyond immediate technical problems, anticipate future needs, identify opportunities for platform evolution, and position infrastructure ahead of business demands"}

### preferred

- {"name":"Kubernetes and Container Orchestration","description":"Experience with Kubernetes or similar container orchestration platforms, understanding operational challenges at scale, and designing applications for distributed container environments"}
- {"name":"Open Source Contribution","description":"Active participation in open source projects, demonstrating commitment to building accessible tools and understanding community-driven software development"}
- {"name":"Developer Tools and Observability","description":"Background building developer tools, application performance monitoring, observability platforms, or infrastructure that directly impacts developer productivity and application reliability"}
- {"name":"AI/ML Infrastructure","description":"Experience building infrastructure supporting machine learning workloads, understanding ML system requirements, and optimizing systems for AI applications like Sentry's Seer"}
- {"name":"Multi-Cloud or Cloud Infrastructure","description":"Experience architecting and operating systems across multiple cloud providers or designing cloud-agnostic infrastructure, understanding cloud service tradeoffs"}
- {"name":"Financial Services or High-Scale Operations","description":"Background in regulated industries or companies operating mission-critical infrastructure at massive scale, understanding the stringent reliability and performance requirements"}

## Tech stack

### tools

- {"name":"Kubernetes","description":"Container orchestration platform for managing and scaling containerized workloads across distributed clusters"}
- {"name":"Docker","description":"Containerization technology for packaging applications and infrastructure components consistently across environments"}
- {"name":"Apache Kafka","description":"Distributed streaming platform for real-time data pipelines, event streaming, and stream processing at scale"}
- {"name":"Prometheus","description":"Monitoring and alerting system for collecting metrics from distributed systems and infrastructure"}
- {"name":"Grafana","description":"Visualization and analytics platform for monitoring infrastructure and system health"}
- {"name":"Datadog","description":"Cloud monitoring and observability platform for monitoring infrastructure, applications, and logs"}

### others

- {"name":"Distributed Consensus Algorithms","description":"Understanding of Raft, Paxos, and other consensus mechanisms used in distributed systems for achieving consistency"}
- {"name":"API Design and Management","description":"Expertise in designing scalable APIs, managing API versioning, and ensuring backward compatibility across systems"}
- {"name":"Infrastructure as Code","description":"Experience with IaC tools like Terraform for defining and managing cloud infrastructure programmatically"}
- {"name":"DevOps Practices","description":"Deep understanding of CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure automation, deployment strategies, and operational best practices"}

### databases

- {"name":"PostgreSQL","description":"Primary OLTP database for storing transactional data, supporting complex queries and consistency guarantees"}
- {"name":"ClickHouse","description":"Columnar OLAP database for analytical workloads, time-series data, and handling massive data volumes efficiently"}
- {"name":"Cassandra","description":"Distributed NoSQL database for handling high-throughput, eventually consistent workloads at massive scale"}
- {"name":"Redis","description":"Distributed in-memory caching and data structure store for session management, rate limiting, and high-performance caching"}
- {"name":"Elasticsearch","description":"Search and analytics engine used for indexing and querying large volumes of data, particularly relevant for observability platforms"}

### languages

- {"name":"Python","description":"Widely used at Sentry for backend services, data processing, and infrastructure tooling; preferred language for many platform components"}
- {"name":"Go","description":"Common language for building distributed systems, high-performance services, and cloud infrastructure tooling"}
- {"name":"Rust","description":"Increasingly used for performance-critical systems, low-level infrastructure, and systems programming in modern platform architectures"}
- {"name":"SQL","description":"Essential for working with OLTP and OLAP databases, query optimization, and data warehousing"}

### frameworks

- {"name":"Django","description":"Backend web framework commonly used at Sentry for building scalable web services and APIs"}
- {"name":"FastAPI","description":"Modern Python framework for building high-performance APIs and microservices with strong typing support"}
- {"name":"gRPC","description":"High-performance RPC framework for service-to-service communication in distributed systems"}

## Benefits

### benefits

- {"name":"Equity Grants","description":"Participation in Sentry's equity compensation program as part of the overall benefits package"}
- {"name":"Performance Bonus","description":"Annual performance bonus of up to 20% of base salary based on individual and company performance metrics"}
- {"name":"Comprehensive Health Insurance","description":"Group health insurance coverage including medical, dental, and vision benefits"}
- {"name":"Paid Time Off","description":"Competitive paid time off policy supporting work-life balance and employee wellness"}
- {"name":"Inclusive Benefits Program","description":"Comprehensive employee benefit plans and programs applicable to the director level position"}

## Compensation

- **max:** 450000
- **min:** 300000
- **currency:** USD
- **stockOptions:** true

## Interview process

### steps

- {"name":"Initial Screening","description":"Conversation with Sentry recruiting team to discuss your background, experience with distributed systems, engineering leadership philosophy, and alignment with the role's requirements"}
- {"name":"Technical Leadership Discussion","description":"Deep technical conversation with one or more of the hiring team or engineers to assess distributed systems knowledge, architectural thinking, and ability to engage in technical discussions across multiple domains"}
- {"name":"Case Study or System Design","description":"Discussion of a complex distributed systems challenge, real architectural decision you've made, or how you would approach designing one of the systems mentioned in the role (database scaling, stream processing, caching architecture)"}
- {"name":"Leadership and Organizational Conversation","description":"Conversation with the hiring manager or senior leadership to discuss team building philosophy, organizational development approach, and how you lead through ambiguity"}
- {"name":"Cross-Functional Alignment","description":"Potential conversations with leaders from Product, Infrastructure, or other Platform teams to assess collaboration style and ability to partner across functions"}
- {"name":"Executive Leadership Meeting","description":"Final conversation with senior leadership to align on vision, strategic priorities, and cultural fit"}

## Full description
## **About Sentry**

Software runs the world and the pace is faster than ever. Sentry helps developers fix errors and performance issues before users notice, so teams can spend less time firefighting and more time building.

Trusted by 200,000+ organizations, Sentry is today’s application monitoring standard and our team is building its AI-native future.

## About the role

We're looking for an experienced engineering leader to own one of the most critical areas within Platform: the runtime and stateful systems Sentry runs on. You'll lead multiple engineering teams and Staff engineers responsible for OLTP and OLAP databases, real-time compute and stream processing, blob storage, and distributed caching.

These systems power Sentry's products, including Seer, and are mission-critical to the business. When they perform well, every product team moves faster. When they don't, the whole company feels the impact.

You'll set the technical vision across these systems, lead significant architectural changes, and develop the engineering leaders and teams responsible for building and operating them. This role requires someone who brings deep technical judgment, thinks strategically, and has a track record of driving complex engineering initiatives from concept through execution.

You'll have the opportunity to shape both the technical direction and organizational growth of a critical part of Sentry's platform as our products and infrastructure continue to evolve.

**This is a hybrid role based in the San Francisco Bay Area, with an expectation of working from our San Francisco office three days per week.**

## In This Role You Will

* Lead multiple engineering teams and Staff engineers responsible for the runtime and stateful systems supporting Sentry, Seer, and the products built on top of them.
* Set the technical vision and strategy across multiple systems, identifying opportunities to evolve our architecture as the business scales.
* Drive significant architectural changes and technical initiatives, making informed tradeoffs around scalability, reliability, performance, cost, and complexity.
* Provide technical leadership across teams, working closely with senior engineers to evaluate architectural decisions, challenge assumptions, and establish technical direction.
* Own the execution and operational excellence of mission-critical systems, ensuring teams deliver reliable, scalable, and high-performing platform components.
* Build and develop a strong engineering organization, including hiring, mentoring, and growing engineering managers and senior technical leaders.
* Foster a culture of engineering excellence, technical accountability, and continuous improvement.
* Partner across Platform, Infrastructure, and Product to align priorities, navigate ambiguity, and deliver complex, cross-functional initiatives.
* Anticipate evolving product and infrastructure needs, identifying opportunities to build new platform capabilities and improve existing systems.

## You'll love this job if you

* Enjoy solving complex distributed systems problems and have strong opinions about architecture, backed by experience and sound technical judgment.
* Thrive in roles where you're equally responsible for technical direction, execution, and developing engineering leaders.
* Like taking ownership of ambiguous technical challenges, establishing a clear strategy, and bringing teams together to execute.
* Are passionate about building large-scale systems where reliability, performance, and efficiency directly impact the business.
* Enjoy partnering with senior engineers, challenging technical assumptions, and helping teams make thoughtful architectural decisions.
* Take pride in building high-performing teams, developing future leaders, and raising the engineering bar.
* Want to shape the runtime foundation supporting Sentry's products and AI capabilities for years to come.

## Qualifications

* 12+ years of experience in backend, platform, or infrastructure engineering, with significant experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems.
* Director-level engineering management experience, or equivalent senior engineering leadership experience overseeing multiple teams at comparable scale and complexity.
* Deep technical expertise in at least one of the following domains:

  * OLTP databases
  * OLAP databases
  * Real-time compute and stream processing
  * Blob/object storage
  * Distributed caching
* Demonstrated experience driving significant architectural changes, including evaluating technical tradeoffs, establishing direction, and leading implementation.
* Strong technical judgment and the ability to engage deeply in architectural discussions across multiple distributed systems domains.
* Proven track record of leading complex, cross-functional engineering initiatives from strategy through execution, with measurable technical or business impact.
* Experience hiring, developing, and leading engineering managers and senior technical talent.
* Strong communication and organizational leadership skills, with the ability to articulate technical concepts, influence senior stakeholders, and align teams around a shared strategy.
* Experience operating mission-critical infrastructure with a strong understanding of reliability, scalability, performance, and operational efficiency.

The base salary range that Sentry reasonably expects to pay for this position is $300,000 to $450,000 USD,plus an annual performance bonus of up to 20% of base salary. A successful candidate’s actual base salary amount will be determined by a variety of relevant factors including, without limitation, the candidate’s work location, education, work and other relevant experience, skills, and job-related knowledge. A successful candidate will be eligible to participate in Sentry’s employee benefit plans/programs applicable to the candidate’s position (including incentive compensation, equity grants, paid time off, and group health insurance coverage). See [Sentry Benefits](https://sentry.io/careers/) for more details about the Company’s benefit plans/programs.

## **Equal Opportunity at Sentry**

Sentry is committed to providing equal employment opportunities to its employees and candidates for employment regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, veteran status, or other legally-protected characteristic. This commitment includes the provision of reasonable accommodations to employees and candidates for employment with physical or mental disabilities who require such accommodations in order to (a) perform the essential functions of their jobs, or (b) seek employment with Sentry. We strive to build a diverse team, with an inclusive culture where every teammate can thrive. Sentry is an open-source company because we believe that everyone, everywhere, should have the ability and tools to make great software. Software should be accessible. That starts with making our industry accessible.

If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, you may contact us at [accommodations@sentry.io](mailto:accommodations@sentry.io).

Want to learn more about how Sentry handles applicant data? Get the details in our [Applicant Privacy Policy](https://sentry.io/careers/applicantprivacy/).