Director of Platform Engineering

📋 Description

• • Somnia is at the forefront of revolutionizing Web3 with its Agentic Chain, a hyper-performance L1 blockchain designed for real-time, autonomous, and fully decentralized applications. As the Director of Platform Engineering, you will play a pivotal role in shaping the operational excellence and strategic direction of our core infrastructure, ensuring its reliability, security, and performance while fostering rapid engineering velocity. This is a unique opportunity to lead and scale a critical engineering organization within a rapidly growing, well-funded startup backed by Improbable, a prominent tech unicorn.
• • In this dynamic role, you will be responsible for the ongoing operations of the Somnia EVM blockchain and its associated core protocols. Your day-to-day will involve leading and scaling a diverse platform engineering organization of approximately 30 individuals across multiple time zones, comprising Engineering Managers, Tech Leads, and Staff/Principal Engineers. You will own the entire lifecycle of your teams, including hiring, performance calibration, and maintaining a high technical quality bar. A primary focus will be establishing and formalizing reliability as a core discipline. This includes defining Service Level Objectives (SLOs) across all product lines, building a robust Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) function, and maturing our incident response processes into a proactive, uptime-focused team. You will also be instrumental in building a self-serve internal developer platform, designing and shipping essential tooling such as CI/CD pipelines, environment management, and comprehensive observability solutions. This platform will empower product teams to deploy confidently with reduced hands-on infrastructure involvement, setting the technical strategy for our cloud-native environments and fostering adoption through collaboration with product engineering leadership.
• • You will serve as the CTO's key operational partner, taking ownership of a seven-figure cloud spend budget and leading headcount planning. You will be the executive team's trusted advisor on infrastructure risk, engineering capacity, and critical technical trade-offs. Furthermore, you will drive the evolution of our engineering organization by partnering closely with the people team to refine and implement fair, rigorous, and data-informed performance review processes, promotion cycles, and compensation planning, ensuring we consistently attract and retain top talent.
• • This role offers significant learning and growth opportunities. You will gain invaluable experience in leading and scaling a high-performance engineering organization in the cutting-edge domain of blockchain technology and decentralized systems. You will have the chance to build and implement best practices in SRE, incident management, and internal developer platforms from the ground up, directly influencing the technical direction and operational maturity of a foundational Web3 protocol. The opportunity to manage budgets, vendor relationships, and strategic headcount planning at a senior leadership level provides a comprehensive experience in operational ownership and executive partnership. You will be empowered to put your unique stamp on how the platform evolves, contributing to the development of a first-of-its-kind hyperspeed L1 with native AI inference, shaping the future of on-chain applications.
• • The Somnia team is a globally distributed group of passionate individuals dedicated to building the future of Web3. We are backed by Improbable, a British tech unicorn with a decade of experience in virtual worlds, and have received significant initial funding from prominent investors like a16z crypto, SoftBank, and Mirana Ventures. Our mission is to empower builders and traders with a platform that enables the creation of real-time, autonomous, and fully decentralized products that were previously impossible. We are fostering a new wave of on-chain applications, from DEXs to prediction protocols, and you will be a key leader in building the infrastructure that makes this vision a reality.
• • As Director of Platform Engineering, you will be at the helm of a complex, multi-cloud footprint (GCP, Runpod) supporting an ultra-high TPS L1 blockchain, extensive RPC node fleets, a decentralized exchange (DEX), consumer products, and AI-driven oracles. This infrastructure is live and operational, but its complexity is growing rapidly, outpacing current processes and tooling. Reliability practices are informal, and the team is ready for more structured leadership. Your mandate is to transform this landscape by formalizing reliability, defining clear SLOs, tightening incident response, and driving a proactive engineering culture. From this solid foundation, you will architect and build a self-serve internal developer platform designed to eliminate infrastructure as a bottleneck for product teams, thereby accelerating feature development and innovation across the organization. This role is a senior leadership position with substantial scope and the ability to make a lasting impact on the evolution of Somnia's platform and protocols.