# Director, Developer Platform & Experience

**Company:** [Motive](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/motive)
**Location:** San Francisco, CA, Seattle, WA
**Role:** Engineering Management
**Salary:** $229k – $285k/yr
**Experience:** 12+ years
**Skills:** Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS, CI/CD, Docker, llm evaluation, ai developer tools, mcp servers, Observability, Ruby on Rails, Go, testing infrastructure, Infrastructure As Code, cloud platforms, dora metrics
**Posted:** 2026-08-13

> Leads a multi-team organization responsible for AI-assisted development, cloud agentic infrastructure, developer experience, CI/CD, testing, and engineering velocity. Requires extensive software engineering and engineering leadership experience, deep infrastructure expertise, and hands-on knowledge of AI developer tooling and LLM evaluation.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities

### AI-Driven Development Lifecycle
- Translate the AI-driven development direction into a multi-year plan covering agent planning, generation, testing, review, operations, human-in-the-loop workflows, and changes to engineers’ work.
- Evaluate and roll out AI developer tools for coding, code review, test generation, incident investigation, and documentation.
- Build internal scaffolding, including context systems, MCP servers, evaluations, and guardrails, for use on production codebases.
- Establish LLM and agent evaluation practices with benchmarks, offline and online evaluations, quality and cost regression tracking, and model and vendor selection.
- Own governance covering acceptable use, code provenance and licensing, secrets and data handling, and audit trails for AI-generated changes.
- Define adoption and impact metrics and drive enablement and organizational adoption.

### Cloud-Based Agentic Development Infrastructure
- Build and own reproducible, isolated, on-demand cloud workspaces provisioned per task.
- Design sandboxed execution, least-privilege credentials, network egress controls, and blast-radius limits.
- Improve speed and cost through warm environment pools, caching, snapshotting, incremental builds, and test selection.
- Own orchestration and control-plane capabilities, including queueing, scheduling, Kubernetes autoscaling, session lifecycle, artifact and log retention, and observability.
- Instrument per-task and per-agent cost, establish budgets and quotas, and maintain platform sustainability.
- Build interfaces for dispatching work to cloud agents, monitoring runs, reviewing and merging results, and intervening in failed runs.
- Design multi-region capabilities for the US and EU while honoring data residency and code-egress constraints.

### Developer Experience and Infrastructure
- Own local and cloud development environments, code search and navigation, IDE and agent tooling, dependency management, and onboarding time-to-first-PR.
- Conduct developer experience research through surveys, interviews, and telemetry, and maintain a visible prioritized backlog.
- Define and drive the internal developer platform, including golden paths, service scaffolding, and self-service capabilities.
- Own build systems, CI/CD, artifact and release pipelines, and the platform outer loop across Rails, Go, mobile, and embedded/firmware codebases.
- Improve DORA and velocity metrics, including PR lead time, build and CI duration, CI reliability, flake rate, change failure rate, and time to restore.
- Make platform cost, scale, and reliability first-class concerns, including multi-region behavior and configuration flexibility.

### Testing and Quality Engineering
- Own testing strategy and frameworks across unit, integration, contract, end-to-end, hardware-in-the-loop, and performance testing.
- Build infrastructure for fixtures, factories, test data management, environment provisioning, parallelization, and flake detection and quarantine.
- Partner with quality and release engineering to shift quality left without slowing teams.

### Leadership
- Lead a multi-team organization as a manager of managers, hiring and developing engineering managers and senior/staff-plus ICs.
- Lead distributed teams across North American and Asian time zones with effective handoffs, overlap hours, fair on-call practices, and inclusion.
- Partner with product and infrastructure leaders, influence engineering broadly, and communicate strategy and results to executives.

## Requirements
- 12+ years of software engineering experience and 6+ years leading engineering teams, including 2+ years as a manager of managers.
- Production software development and operations experience with strong technical judgment.
- Deep experience with CI/CD, build systems, containers, Kubernetes, Terraform, cloud platforms, and observability.
- Ownership of developer productivity, developer platforms, or developer infrastructure at meaningful scale with measurable velocity outcomes.
- Hands-on experience with modern AI developer tooling and a well-reasoned perspective on agentic development.
- Experience operating cloud-based development or execution environments, including security and cost controls.
- Practical experience evaluating LLMs and agents for coding tasks, quality, and cost.
- Strong developer empathy and experience leading distributed, multi-time-zone teams.

## Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with large monolith modernization and polyglot environments including Ruby on Rails, Go, mobile, and embedded systems.
- Test infrastructure experience at scale, including flake reduction, test selection, parallelization, and hermetic environments.
- Experience running platform work as a product with roadmaps, adoption funnels, internal customers, and feature-flagged rollouts.
- Familiarity with multi-region deployment and US/EU data residency constraints.
- Open source contributions, developer community involvement, or public writing about developer productivity or AI-assisted engineering.

## Compensation and Benefits
- United States compensation range: **$229,000–$285,000 USD**.
- Total compensation may include restricted stock units.
- Benefits may include health, pharmacy, optical and dental coverage, paid time off, sick time off, short- and long-term disability coverage, life insurance, and 401(k) contributions, subject to eligibility requirements.

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