Engineering Leader, Platform Engineering - ClassDojo

ClassDojo's goal is to give every child on Earth an education they love. We started by building a communication network that connects teachers, children, and families, and today we reach tens of millions globally. We're now expanding beyond communication into building the best possible learning experiences for kids everywhere.

We're hiring an Engineering Leader to own ClassDojo's Platform engineering organization end-to-end for infrastructure, data, developer experience, and AI tooling.

As the Engineering Lead for Platform, you'll manage engineering managers across these teams, setting platform engineering practices, quality standards, and making the build-vs-buy and architecture trade-offs that shape how every engineer at ClassDojo ships.

What You'll Do

Lead a Multi-Team Platform Org

• Own Platform's company-level objectives and the engineering plan that delivers them.
• Translate company priorities and product-engineering needs into a clear platform roadmap.
• Drive build-vs-buy and architecture-level trade-offs across infrastructure, data, developer experience, and AI tooling.
• Represent Platform and collaborate with cross-functional leadership partners.

Develop Engineering Managers

• Coach EMs to a higher bar with clear feedback, growth plans, and direct support.
• Drive AI-native development in line with ClassDojo’s engineering practices (flow-based delivery, vertical slicing, WIP discipline, Definition of Done, observability).
• Address performance issues early and clearly; develop managers out of "fine" performance into great performance.

Run Platform Towards the Long Term

• Treat product engineering areas as customers: understand needs, measure adoption and satisfaction, and prioritize accordingly.
• Build paved roads and golden paths that teams want to use.
• Take accountability for SLAs/SLOs and incident response across the platform surface.

Drive Technical Excellence

• Support and drive architecture and systems design decisions across infrastructure, data, DevEx, and AI tooling.
• Make build-vs-buy calls deliberately to avoid unmanaged sprawl.

Partner Cross-Functionally

• Co-own the platform roadmap and quality bar with product engineering leads.
• Partner with Security, Ops, Data, and other functions as the platform requires.

You Will Be a Match If You...

• 2+ years managing managers, with direct reports who were themselves people managers.
• 10+ years total in technical roles, with a strong individual-contributor background.
• Have owned a platform, infrastructure, data, or developer-productivity area and delivered a measurable outcome (throughput, reliability, cost, or operational safety).
• Have built or evolved platform engineering practices across multiple teams and earned adoption.
• Comfortable making and defending build-vs-buy and architecture-level trade-offs.
• Embrace Candor > Harmony: give the hard message early and handle disagreement comfortably.
• Use LLM-based tools daily and push your teams to adopt them.
• Excellent written communicator with the ability to articulate strategy and trade-offs clearly in writing.

Nice to Have

• Experience running infrastructure, data, DevEx, or AI platforms at meaningful scale.
• Built developer platforms that internal engineers genuinely adopted.
• Used AI-native workflows to materially change how a team designs, ships, and operates.
• Experience leading a remote-first, distributed engineering team.
• Brings a network of high-quality platform/infrastructure engineering talent.