Director of Platform Engineering

ABOUT THE ROLE We're looking for a Director of Platform Engineering to own and scale the infrastructure, security, and IT operations that power Clutch's platform. Clutch is a vertical SaaS company (backed by A16z) that provides white-label lending and account opening software to credit unions across the US. Our platform serves 163 credit unions, processes sensitive financial data, and must meet strict compliance requirements (SOC 2 Type II, GLBA, CCPA). This role is the single owner of our cloud infrastructure (AWS), security posture, compliance programs, IT operations, and vendor management. You'll report directly to the VP of Engineering and work closely with the CEO, COO, and Legal on strategy. This is a leadership role where you'll define the direction, build the team, and execute with high autonomy. ABOUT THE TEAM You'll lead a team spanning Infrastructure, Security, and IT. Today the team includes an Infrastructure engineering manager (Lucas Sousa) and his engineers, Security individual contributors, and a small IT support team. The broader engineering org is about 80 people across Brazil and the US, organized into five areas: Lending, Foundations, Security and IT, Account Opening, and cross-functional teams (HAL AI, Data). You'll work cross-functionally with every engineering team (they all depend on your platform), plus Finance (vendor budgets), Legal (compliance), and Customer Success (implementation environments). The culture is direct, accountable, and moves fast. We operate on a "You Build It, You Run It" principle and value completed staff work over escalation. WHAT YOU'LL DO WITHIN 3 MONTHS, YOU WILL: - Complete a full audit of infrastructure, security posture, vendor accounts, and IT operations. Identify gaps and quick wins - Take ownership of all vendor relationships and complete account transfers from the previous director - Establish your working relationship with every engineering team, Finance, Legal, and Customer Success - Assess and strengthen incident response protocols and cybersecurity monitoring (Datadog SIEM, Cloudflare) - Evaluate and stabilize IT operations, including support SLAs and the endpoint management program WITHIN 6 MONTHS, YOU WILL: - Drive vendor rationalization. We have 30+ tools identified for review ($229K in immediate cuts, $1.2M under evaluation). Own the decision-making and execution - Implement improvements to our compliance program (SOC 2 Type II, GLBA) and own the next audit cycle - Optimize cloud infrastructure costs and performance across our AWS organization (multiple accounts, ECS Fargate, Aurora PostgreSQL) - Improve sandbox and environment management for customer implementations. Credit unions need secure, reliable sandbox environments for onboarding - Define and begin executing on the team structure and hiring plan for your org WITHIN 9 MONTHS, YOU WILL: - Have a fully staffed and operating Platform Engineering org with clear ownership boundaries - Advance cloud security and data protection strategies, including improvements to per-partner data segregation and encryption (AES-256, FIPS 140-2 Level 3) - Lead a company-wide security awareness program and foster a security-first culture across engineering - Drive automation and tooling improvements that measurably reduce toil for the broader engineering org - Own and present the platform roadmap, including infrastructure scaling strategy for the next 12 months WHAT YOU'LL BRING Must-haves: - 8+ years of experience in platform engineering, infrastructure, and/or security leadership, preferably in B2B SaaS or fintech - Proven leadership experience managing infrastructure, security, and IT teams in a fast-paced environment - Deep knowledge of AWS (ECS Fargate, Aurora PostgreSQL, IAM, KMS, S3, VPC) and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Terragrunt) - Strong understanding of security frameworks and compliance standards: SOC 2 Type II, GLBA, CCPA, and ideally PCI DSS - Experience owning vendor management and budget optimization at