Director of Platform Engineering

About the Role

As Director of Platform Engineering at Improbable, you will lead the ongoing operations of Somnia's blockchain infrastructure and core protocols. Reporting to the CTO, you'll partner closely with product engineering leadership to maintain rapid feature development while ensuring system reliability across a complex, multi-cloud decentralised infrastructure serving an ultra-high TPS L1 blockchain ecosystem.

Somnia's technology portfolio encompasses the core Somnia EVM blockchain, along with key protocols and features including on-chain decentralised LLM execution, prediction markets, and fully on-chain order book DEXes. You'll oversee infrastructure spanning GCP and Runpod, supporting RPC node fleets, a DEX, consumer products, and AI-driven oracles—with many third-party operators running critical chain components and services.

Your Primary Responsibilities

• Formalise reliability practices: Your first priority is establishing SLOs across all product lines, building an SRE function, and maturing incident response into a proactive engineering discipline focused on maximum uptime.
• Lead and scale the platform organisation: Directly manage Engineering Managers, Tech Leads, and Staff/Principal engineers across multiple time zones (~30 people growing). Own hiring, performance calibration, and technical quality standards.
• Build the internal developer platform: Design and ship tooling including CI/CD pipelines, environments, and observability solutions enabling product teams to deploy confidently with reduced infrastructure bottlenecks. Set technical strategy for cloud-native environments and build consensus for adoption.
• Operate as CTO's strategic partner: Manage seven-figure cloud spend and headcount planning. Be the executive team's trusted advisor on infrastructure risk, engineering capacity, and technical trade-offs.
• Drive high-performance culture: Lead cross-functional engineering initiatives that align velocity with reliability while supporting downstream application development in a decentralised infrastructure environment.

Current State & Opportunity

The infrastructure is live and operational today, but complexity is outpacing current processes and tooling. Reliability practices remain informal, and the team is ready for structured leadership. This is a senior leadership role with genuine scope—you'll have a functioning foundation to build upon with considerable room to shape how the platform evolves.

What You'll Need

This role requires proven experience scaling platform engineering teams, building reliability disciplines in complex distributed systems, and operating at the infrastructure leadership level. Experience with blockchain or decentralised systems is valuable. You should excel at cross-functional collaboration, vendor management, and translating technical complexity for executive stakeholders.

💰 Compensation not publicly listed. Market estimate for similar roles: from $140K, varying by experience and location.