Level: Director. Reports to: CTO.What’s the role: Lead strategy, people, delivery, and operations for Applications Engineering as Estuary formalizes Platform vs Applications across the stack. Peer to Head of Platform Engineering. Own the transition from a flat team of generalists to durable, high-ownership pods.What you’ll do:- Optimize project delivery by focusing competing needs into a clear technical pipeline.- Maintain SLOs; manage issue triage/response; safeguard a 'fix bugs first' culture.- Manage and nurture: establish engineering management culture; organize and grow the team.- Partner tightly with co-founders and cross-functional leads to develop roadmap and commitments.- Drive operational excellence; improve development processes and risk minimization.- Own hiring engine: sourcing, interviewing, scoring, onboarding.- Be a player‑coach: review designs, prototype, and contribute code as needed.Qualifications:- 8–12+ years in platform engineering; 3–5+ years leading teams; managed 8–20 engineers across 2–4 pods.- Proven leadership structuring multi-team engineering in complex (preferably B2B) domains.- Hiring/leveling senior ICs and leads; manager‑of‑managers a plus.- Strong communication across technical/non-technical stakeholders; incident response leadership.- Interest in data-intensive applications/platforms.How we work: High autonomy; remote‑first, async-friendly; global team (east-coast hours).Compensation & leveling: Market‑competitive cash + equity.