Director of Platform Engineering

Posted:
3/19/2025, 11:56:13 AM

Location(s):
San Francisco, California, United States ⋅ California, United States

Experience Level(s):
Senior

Field(s):
Software Engineering

Workplace Type:
Hybrid

Pay:
$150/hr or $312,000 total comp

About Checkr
Checkr is building the data platform to power safe and fair decisions. Established in 2014, Checkr’s innovative technology and robust data platform help customers assess risk and ensure safety and compliance to build trusted workplaces and communities. Checkr has over 100,000 customers including DoorDash, Coinbase, Lyft, Instacart, and Airtable.

We’re a team that thrives on solving complex problems with innovative solutions that advance our mission. Checkr is recognized on Forbes Cloud 100 2024 List and is a Y Combinator 2024 Breakthrough Company.

As the Director of Platform Engineering at Checkr, you will be responsible for driving the organization's overall platform and infrastructure strategy. To achieve this, you will need to have a deep understanding of platform engineering and how to drive a strategic roadmap of foundational capabilities and, most importantly, its adoption by the other development teams.

What you’ll do

  • Guide the technical vision and strategy for the best-in-class highly scalable, available, and secure platform and infrastructure.
  • Create a broad catalog of services based on capabilities and platforms that can be leveraged by other engineering teams at Checkr.
  • Develop and drive platform architecture practices that encourage common solution elements, patterns, and reuse. 
  • Build a cross-collaborative culture between the platform and other engineering teams.
  • Operationalize and manage delivery across the platform engineering team, scaling processes and systems.
  • Foster an action-bias culture for product innovation and delivery, high performance, transparency, and continuous improvement.
  • Work across the engineering team to shape software development to meet Checkr's objectives and key results.
  • Build a diverse, equitable, inclusive culture that helps all members feel like they belong
  • Partner with product leadership to influence business strategy, especially in your area of ownership
  • Bring customer centricity to your entire engineering team
  • Hire, retain, and scale a world-class engineering team team 

What you bring

  • Demonstrated success in building and leading vision, strategy, and execution of platform engineering initiatives
  • Experience with driving successful platform adoption programs, with the ability to demonstrate the business impact of such initiatives
  • Data-driven mindset: you know that everything built must be measured to understand its impact on the business and drive your teams to build with that in mind
  • Customer centricity: you understand that customer behavior and sentiment must be well understood to effectively build products for them; this can be understood both through data as well as qualitative discussions with customers
  • Experience defining and scaling modern products (API, self-service, UX first products)
  • Highly effective communicator with good people instincts - able to build trust and work well with a diverse group both internally and externally
  • Willingness to lead in a hands-on, high-performance environment
  • Organized, self-motivated and detail-oriented
  • High degree of humility and accountability
  • Experience leading, growing, and retaining high-performance engineering leadership at the Director+ level

What you’ll get

  • A fast-paced and collaborative environment
  • Learning and development allowance
  • Competitive compensation and opportunity for advancement
  • 100% medical, dental, and vision coverage
  • Up to $25K reimbursement for fertility, adoption, and parental planning services
  • Flexible PTO policy
  • Monthly wellness stipend, home office stipend

At Checkr, we believe a hybrid work environment strengthens collaboration, drives innovation, and encourages connection. Our hub locations are Denver, CO, San Francisco, CA, and Santiago, Chile. Individuals are expected to work from the office 2 to 3 days a week. In-office perks are provided, such as lunch four times a week, a commuter stipend, and an abundance of snacks and beverages. 

One of Checkr’s core values is Transparency. To live by that value, we’ve made the decision to disclose salary ranges in all of our job postings. We use geographic cost of labor as an input to develop ranges for our roles and as such, each location where we hire may have a different range. If this role is remote, we have listed the top to the bottom of the possible range, but we will specify the target range for an exact location when you are selected for a recruiting discussion. For more information on our compensation philosophy, see our website.

The base salary range for this role is $299,000 to $352,000 in San Francisco, CA.

Equal Employment Opportunities at Checkr

Checkr is committed to building the best product and company, which requires hiring talented and qualified individuals with a diverse set of perspectives and lived experiences. Checkr believes in hiring people of all backgrounds, including those whose histories are impacted by the justice system in accordance with local, state, and/or federal laws, including the San Francisco’s Fair Chance Ordinance.