University of Chicago · 1 month ago
Director of Platform Engineering
Chicago, IL
Full-time
Hybrid
Director/Executive
$194K/yr - $210K/yr
7+ years expThe University of Chicago is a prestigious institution seeking an experienced leader to serve as the Director of Platform Engineering for Globus. This role involves providing technical leadership and strategic direction for the Globus platform, managing backend engineering teams, and ensuring the delivery of scalable and robust solutions to meet evolving business needs.
Higher Education
Responsibilities
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
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
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
Performs other related work as needed
Qualification
Required
Minimum requirements include a college or university degree in related field
Minimum requirements include knowledge and skills developed through 7+ years of work experience in a related job discipline
Resume (required)
Preferred
Experience leading technical teams and managing direct reports, preferably across multiple teams or product domains
Experience with building large scale distributed applications, and supporting production deployment with large customer base
Experience leading and coordinating cross cutting initiatives in a product organization, and engaging across functions (e.g. product management, customer engagement)
15+ years of professional software engineering experience
10+ years in Python or C/C++
5+ years of technical leadership roles defining architecture and technical direction for complex systems
Deep expertise in backend technologies, including database, APIs, micro-services, cloud platform
Expertise architecting and designing software/platform-as-a service applications
Strong understanding of software development best practices, including testing, CI/CD, and operations (monitoring)
Experience working directly with customers to understand needs and provide technical solutions
Excellent verbal and written communication skills
Strong analytical and problem solving skills
Excellent organizational skills and constant attention to detail
Ability to articulate project needs and effectively communicate with coworkers in a respectful and collaborative manner
Effectively prioritize, triage, and manage competing priorities and deadlines
Mastery of fundamental concepts, practices, and procedures of software development applications and tools
Benefits
Health
Retirement
Paid time off
Company
University of Chicago
One of the world’s great intellectual destinations, the University of Chicago empowers scholars and students to ask tough questions, cross disciplinary boundaries, and challenge conventional thinking to enrich human life around the globe.
10001+ employees
H1B Sponsorship
University of Chicago has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
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Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (341)
2024 (318)
2023 (285)
2022 (233)
2021 (179)
2020 (172)
Funding
Current Stage
Late StageLeadership Team
Benedicte Nolens
Distinguished Executive in Residence
Recent News
2025-11-08
San Gabriel Valley Tribune
2025-10-23
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