Description
About First Due
First Due’s mission is to prevent first responder injury or death by providing fire and EMS agencies with transformative, end-to-end software solutions that empower them to run safer, smarter, and more effective operations.
Job Title: Director of Platform Engineering
Location: Remote - US Only
Country: United States
Department: Engineering
Reports To: SVP, Engineering
Position Type: Full-Time
Salary: $240,000
Job Summary:
This is a new, dedicated leadership role reporting to the SVP of Engineering, accountable for turning First Due's DevOps, SRE, database reliability, incident-management, and developer-experience practices from distributed and ad hoc into centralized and disciplined. The right leader brings genuine hands-on technical depth to build and run this function, and the executive presence to represent platform reliability and operational maturity to the ELT.
Key Responsibilities:
DevOps & CI/CD
- Assesses and centralizes CI/CD and deployment practices across product lines; owns the rollout
- Directly contributes where useful — e.g., containerizing and automating deployments, not just directing others
- Improves deployment frequency, predictability, environment consistency, and release safety
Site Reliability Engineering & Observability
- Stands up SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, and production reliability standards
- Owns monitoring, alerting, and observability patterns/dashboards, standardized across teams
- Partners with development teams on consistent instrumentation rather than owning their code
Incident Management & Operational Discipline
- Owns on-call tooling, rotation design, and escalation policy company-wide, partnering with Support, Product, QA, and Development to ensure comprehensive escalation resolutions
- Defines and enforces RCA and post-incident review discipline, using AI to speed investigation and information-gathering
- Builds these as adopted practices across teams that don't report to this role — requires real influence without authority
Database Reliability Engineering (DBRE)
- Owns operational reliability of First Due's core production database(s): uptime, query performance, capacity
- Defines schema-change practice and review discipline for a monolithic, high-traffic database
- Partners with Infrastructure on backup, continuity, and BCDR runbooks, and is accountable for testing them
Engineering Operations & Metrics
- Defines and implements the operational metrics set (deployment frequency, MTTR, system health, uptime), distinct from delivery/velocity metrics
- Builds the dashboards and reporting giving engineering and executive leadership real visibility into system health
- Formalizes the AI natural-language query layer already in use against observability data into a shared standard for "how we observe system health"
Developer Experience & Shared Frontend Platform
- Partners with the owner of shared component libraries, frontend build tooling, and design-system/API contracts used by product teams — not feature UI work
- Sponsors (without managing) a dotted-line Frontend Guild that drives convention adoption across module teams
Cross-Team Architecture Influence
- Looks across product groups to spot shared structural patterns and drift — e.g., business logic embedded in frontend code that belongs in per-module backend APIs — and drives the fix
- Influences cross-cutting platform architecture; does not own product/feature architecture or act as a Chief Architect
Team Building
- Builds this function's structure and hiring plan from the ground up, making the business case for each hire as the need is proven — headcount is not prescribed in advance
- Establishes the team's operating rhythm (on-call, incident reviews, roadmap planning)
Qualifications:
- CI/CD and deployment-pipeline modernization at scale
- Formal SRE practice: SLOs, observability/alerting tooling, incident management
- On-call/incident-management program design (e.g., PagerDuty or equivalent) and RCA practice enforcement
- Database reliability/operations experience (schema governance, query optimization, backup/BCDR) for a high-traffic production database, or has directly managed someone who does
- Vertical SaaS, regulated, or mission-critical software is a plus; public safety experience is an advantage
- Executive presence: can talk to the ELT about reliability, risk, and operational maturity in business terms
- Genuinely hands-on — willing to be in the pipeline, the dashboard, or the incident channel
For US-based Roles
All applicants must be authorized to work for any US employer in the United States. Locality Media LLC is unable to sponsor or transition sponsorship ownership of employment visas at this time. Hiring is contingent upon candidates successfully passing a criminal background check. As part of the I-9 verification of authorization to work in the US, Locality Media participates in E-Verify.
Physical Demands and Work Environment
This role is fully remote with minimal travel expectations at this time. Reasonable accommodation may be made to enable qualified employees and applicants to perform the essential functions as outlined above. If you require an accommodation during the interview process, please reach out to people@firstdue.com.
Working at First Due
First Due offers a comprehensive compensation and benefits package for eligible employees, including competitive pay, medical, dental, and vision coverage, FSA/HSA, 401(k), flexible PTO, a fully remote workplace, a technology stipend, opportunities for advancement, and other benefits and perks that sets our team apart. Visit www.firstdue.com to learn more.
If you are a resident of a state requiring wage transparency, please reach out to people@firstdue.com for a reasonable estimate of annual base compensation and any eligible incentive compensation. The actual compensation offered to successful candidates for roles may be higher or lower, based on non-discriminatory criteria including but not limited to relevant professional experience, geographic location, knowledge, skills, and abilities. This range will be reviewed on a regular basis.
First Due is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate in any aspect of employment on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status, or any other protected status or class. We are committed to promoting an environment of respect, acceptance, diversity and inclusivity, and equal opportunity. Discrimination and harassment of any type in any form will not be tolerated.
When you apply for a role at Locality Media, LLC d/b/a First Due, we collect personal information such as identifiers (e.g., name, email, phone number), professional and employment information, education information, and information you provide in your application materials. We use this information to evaluate your candidacy, communicate with you, and manage our recruiting process. We may share this information with our service providers who assist with recruiting and background screening. We do not sell or share applicant personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising. We retain applicant information in accordance with our data retention policies. California residents have rights under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), as amended by the CPRA. For more information, please review our Candidate Privacy here.
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