Engineering Leader, Platform Engineering

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. Today, ClassDojo is used in the vast majority of U.S. schools and reaches tens of millions of children and families globally. We're now expanding beyond communication into building the best possible learning experiences for kids everywhere. We're a small, high-talent-density team with experience from leading technology companies. We value ownership, speed, and thoughtful decision-making, and we aim to create an environment where people can do the best work of their careers. We're hiring an Engineering Leader to own ClassDojo's Platform engineering org end-to-end for infrastructure, data, developer experience, and AI tooling. As the Engineering Lead for Platform, you'll manage the engineering managers across these teams as well as perform the EM role for teams when needed. You’ll work with our product engineering areas as your customers, set platform engineering practices and quality, and make the build-vs-buy and architecture trade-offs that shape how every engineer at ClassDojo ships. This is a manager-of-managers role with real architectural and strategic ownership. You'll have 2 to 4 engineering managers reporting in, and your work multiplies across the entire engineering org. You will be expected to set direction, not just execute on it. 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 platform roadmap, in a way that flows both up and down.
• Be responsible for build-vs-buy and architecture-level trade-offs across infrastructure, data, developer experience, and AI tooling; own the technical roadmap and how it balances against the needs of your customers.
• Represent Platform and collaborate with cross-functional leadership partners and in engineering-wide leadership conversations.

• 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.
• Be directive when our values, quality bar, or ways of working are at stake.

• Build paved roads and golden paths that teams want to use; earn adoption rather than mandating it.
• Take accountability for SLAs/SLOs and incident response across the platform surface.
• Make tech-debt and reliability trade-offs on purpose, not by accident.

• Make build-vs-buy calls deliberately; avoid both not-invented-here and unmanaged sprawl. Partner cross-functionally - Co-own the platform roadmap and quality bar with the product engineering leads who depend on you.
• Partner with Security, Ops, Data, and other functions as the platform requires.
• Build pragmatic interim solutions that work today and migrate cleanly as platform capabilities mature.

• 10+ years total in technical roles, with a strong individual-contributor era you can still draw on.
• 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, not just within one, and earned adoption.
• Have hired, developed, and managed engineering managers.
• Comfortable making and defending build-vs-buy and architecture-level trade-offs across the platform surface; can still reason about code with taste.
• Embrace Candor > Harmony: give the hard message early, comfortable with disagreement.
• Use LLM-based tools daily and push your teams to adopt them.
• Are an excellent written communicator; can articulate strategy and trade-offs clearly in writing.

• Has built developer platforms that internal engineers genuinely adopted (paved roads, golden paths, internal developer platforms).
• Has used AI-native workflows to materially change how a team designs, ships, and operates, and/or has built AI tooling/platform for other engineers (not just personal use).
• Experience leading a remote-first, distributed engineering team.
• Brings a network of high-quality platform/infrastructure engineering talent. [1] Some more context: (If you are on LinkedIn, you will not be able to access the hyperlinks below.

• Highlight concrete platform‑engineering projects where you built end‑to‑end infrastructure (IaC, CI/CD, Kubernetes, Terraform) and quantified impact (e.g., reduced deployment time by 70% or cut cloud spend $200K/yr); include links to public repos, architecture diagrams, or internal case studies in your portfolio.
• Prepare a one‑page “Platform Metrics Dashboard” built in Excel that shows key reliability and performance KPIs (MTTR, error budget, cost per request) for a past team; walk interviewers through how you used the data to drive ownership‑focused improvements and rapid decision‑making.
• Demonstrate remote‑first leadership by sharing a brief video or slide deck of your async communication rituals (e.g., weekly “Ownership Updates,” async design reviews, Slack incident blameless post‑mortems) and how they kept high‑velocity delivery while maintaining psychological safety.
• In the system‑design interview, focus on ClassDojo’s multi‑tenant data platform and AI tooling pipeline: sketch a scalable, cost‑effective architecture that isolates tenant data, supports real‑time feature flags, and integrates an ML model serving layer, then discuss trade‑offs in latency, security, and developer experience.
• Research ClassDojo’s recent product expansions (e.g., learning‑experience APIs, AI‑driven insights) and prepare a 5‑minute “quick win” proposal for a platform improvement (such as a unified observability stack or automated cost‑optimization tool) that aligns with their values of ownership, speed, and thoughtful decision‑making.
• When negotiating, reference ClassDojo’s remote‑first policy and market‑rate equity for senior engineering leaders at comparable ed‑tech unicorns; ask for a salary band tied to performance‑based milestones (e.g., platform reliability targets) and a remote work stipend for home‑office setup.