HEAD OF BACKEND PLATFORM ENGINEERING

Job Description

Albert's mission is to Digitalize the World of Chemistry, using data and machine learning to drastically accelerate the invention of new materials. We are building a world-class engineering organization to power this vision. If you are passionate about building platforms from the ground up, growing high-impact engineering teams, and shaping the technical foundation of a rapidly maturing SaaS product, we want you on our team

About the Role

We are seeking a Head of Backend Platform Engineering to consolidate and grow a newly unified platform organization - bringing together our Backend Platform Services, Data, and Search teams into a cohesive, high-functioning engineering group. This is a formative leadership role: the org exists, the talent is here, but the shared identity, operating model, and strategic direction need to be built.You will define what this platform org becomes - setting strategy, establishing engineering standards, creating the conditions for strong technical execution, and growing the people and teams in your charge. You will be a credible technical partner to your engineers, capable of shaping architecture decisions and rolling up your sleeves when it matters, while primarily leading through others.A key dimension of this role is your partnership with Enterprise Engineering - the team responsible for customer integrations, migrations, and connections.

As Albert matures, the boundary between bespoke customer solutions and core product capabilities is an active frontier. You will work closely with Enterprise Engineering to pull proven patterns and emerging integration needs into the platform, ensuring that what gets built for one customer becomes repeatable infrastructure for all.This is not a steady-state management role. It requires someone who can build organizational clarity out of ambiguity, earn technical credibility with senior engineers, and execute at the intersection of platform strategy and day-to-day delivery

Responsibilities:

Platform Organization BuildingUnite the Backend Platform Services, Data, and Search teams under a shared operating model with clear ownership boundaries, team identities, and collaboration norms.Establish the platform org's mission, roadmap, and success metrics - defining what "platform health" means at Albert and making it visible across engineering.Build a culture of technical rigor, psychological safety, and continuous improvement across your teams.Grow your teams: hire strong engineers and managers, develop existing talent, and build a leadership pipeline below you.Own resourcing, capacity planning, and prioritization across the platform organization

Technical Leadership & Architectural DirectionServe as a credible technical voice for the platform - capable of engaging deeply on architecture trade-offs, reviewing designs, and guiding engineers toward sound decisions.Set architectural guardrails and standards that enable secure, scalable, resilient, and event-driven systems across product and platform teams.Guide the platform's evolution across cloud infrastructure (AWS), shared backend services, data pipelines, search capabilities, and asynchronous processing patterns.Identify and eliminate architectural inconsistencies, duplication, and toil across the platform surface area.Get hands-on when needed - in design reviews, incident response, or critical technical decisions - without becoming a bottleneck

Enterprise Engineering PartnershipBuild a close working relationship with the Head of Enterprise Engineering to ensure that customer integration patterns, migration workflows, and connection frameworks feed back into the platform as first-class capabilities.Define the process by which bespoke customer solutions get evaluated and productized - distinguishing one-off implementations from patterns worth standardizing.Align platform roadmap investments with the integration and deployment needs surfaced by Enterprise Engineering and Solutions teams.Ensure the platform provides the primitives - APIs, connectors, data ingress/egress, event systems - that Enterprise Engineering needs to move fast with enterprise customers

Platform Strategy & Cloud ArchitectureOwn and evolve the long-term platform strategy, with AWS as the primary environment.Drive the transition from bespoke implementations to repeatable, productized platform capabilities that scale across Albert's enterprise customer base.Ensure platform investments directly support business priorities and customer outcomes, in close partnership with Product and Engineering leadership.Guide platform decisions with a pragmatic view of cost efficiency, build vs. buy trade-offs, and long-term maintainability

Engineering Management & Delivery ExcellenceLead multiple platform teams through senior managers and technical leads, establishing clear delivery plans, milestones, and accountability.Ensure large, cross-team initiatives are delivered on time, with high quality, and with transparent communication of progress, risks, and trade-offs.Balance short-term delivery needs with long-term platform health and technical sustainability

Developer Experience & Operational EnablementSet direction for developer experience, DevOps, and internal platform tooling that accelerates product teams while reducing operational friction.Ensure best practices for infrastructure as code, CI/CD, observability, and cloud cost management are consistently applied.Embed operational excellence into platform design, including availability targets, incident management, and performance monitoring

Security & CompliancePartner with Security and Compliance leadership to ensure security and privacy requirements are designed into the platform by default.Oversee platform alignment with SOC 2 requirements as a live obligation, and GDPR as a data handling standard.Drive consistent implementation of security architectures, policies, and controls across teams

Requirements:Demonstrated track record of building and scaling platform or infrastructure engineering organizations - ideally from an early or fragmented state - including hiring, developing managers, and establishing operating models.Proven ability to lead multi-team engineering orgs through senior managers or technical leads, with a bias toward distributed ownership over centralized control.Strong architectural command of cloud-native, distributed, and event-driven systems, with hands-on AWS depth. You can review a design, identify the flaw, and articulate a better path - not just approve what's put in front of you.Experience operating in SaaS environments with enterprise customers, including exposure to the integration, deployment, and extensibility challenges they introduce.Track record of translating ambiguous technical or business challenges into clear platform strategy and executable plans.Demonstrated ability to build credibility with senior technical individual contributors - engineers respect your judgment, not just your title

Good to Have:Experience working closely with a customer-facing or enterprise integration engineering team, and systematically converting customer-specific solutions into platform capabilities.Background in chemistry, materials science, life sciences, or scientific computing - or demonstrated curiosity about domain-specific platform requirements in technical industries.Exposure to multi-cloud environments (Azure, GCP) in contexts where it was a real architectural requirement, not incidental.Experience with GxP, ISO 27001, or other regulated-industry compliance frameworks beyond SOC 2.Familiarity with audit-ready system design and working with compliance or security teams to build scalable controls

About Albert InventAlbert Invent is a cutting-edge AI-driven software company headquartered in Oakland, California, on a mission to empower scientists and innovators in chemistry and materials science to invent the future faster. Every day, scientists in 30+ countries use Albert to accelerate R&D with AI trained like a chemist, bringing better products to market, faster

Why Join Albert InventAs Head of Backend Platform Engineering, you will shape the foundation that powers Albert's future - not inherit a finished org, but build one. You will have the scope to define how platform engineering works at Albert: how teams collaborate, how architecture decisions get made, how the platform grows from a collection of services into a coherent, productized capability. This is a rare opportunity to have genuine organizational and technical impact at a company where the platform is still being invented

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