Director of Platform Engineering

Job Description

Department Provost Globus About the Department Globus (www. globus. org) is a sustainable, non-profit unit within The University of Chicago delivering solutions to the research community worldwide.

Globus develops and provides critical services that support scientific research for governmental, academic, and commercial organizations in a wide range of disciplines including life sciences, physics, and astronomy. We develop and operate commercial-quality, cloud-based software application and platform services used by 10s of thousands of researchers to manage their large–and growing–data management challenges. We have offices located at the NBC Tower in the heart of downtown Chicago and remote employees who work-from-home. Globus, together with Globus Labs, a research group within the University of Chicago, and part of the Data Science and Learning Division at Argonne National Labs, develop and deploy cutting edge technologies to solve new challenges facing the scientific community and enable break-through scientific discoveries.

Job Summary We are seeking an experienced leader to serve as the Director of Platform Engineering for Globus. A key leadership role in the unit, this position provides technical leadership and strategic direction for the Globus platform to drive delivery and evolution.

You’ll guide critical technology decisions, lead recruitment efforts, and provide architecture leadership on strategic engagements to shape and deliver scalable, robust solutions that meet evolving business needs. Managing backend engineering and operations teams, you’ll mentor talent, build a strong, diverse organization, and foster an inclusive culture that attracts top talent. As a senior leader on the team, you’ll collaborate with other functional leaders to ensure the growth and success of Globus.

Responsibilities Technical Leadership & Architecture Define technical vision and architecture for cross-cutting priority initiatives, and provide leadership for such product initiatives. Drive platform evolution to support scale, performance, and new platform use cases. Translate business requirements into well-designed applications while balancing user and business needs, technical competencies, and industry developments.

Partner with engineering and operations managers to ensure cohesive design patterns, consistent practices, operational excellence, and timely delivery. Collaborate with the Clients team to align backend service capabilities with client application requirements and user experience goals.

Guide decisions on infrastructure, server technologies, programming languages, platforms, and frameworks that best serve organizational goals. Customer Engagement & Product Strategy Collaborate with the customer team and when appropriate directly with customers, to understand usage patterns and gather feedback to inform product enhancements. Work closely with product management to ensure effective prioritization and resource allocation for timely delivery of high-value capabilities.

Partner with the support team to provide expert guidance on platform usage, and provide technical leadership on strategic professional service engagements. People Management & Development Manage backend engineering and operations teams, including managers and individual contributors. Set clear expectations, provide feedback, and conduct performance reviews.

Mentor and coach team members to grow technical and leadership capabilities; create clear career paths and development opportunities. Lead recruitment to build a strong engineering organization, including defining needs, interviewing candidates, and building diverse and highly effective teams. Foster an inclusive, collaborative engineering culture that attracts and retains top talent; address team health and engagement proactively.

Manages employees by establishing annual performance goals, allocating resources, assessing annual performance, and determining individual merit, incentive and/or promotional increases. Provides technical oversight and develops standards, guidelines, and processes for application systems. Creates plans to translate business requirements into well-designed applications while balancing user and business needs, technical competencies, industry developments, and time constraints.

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