VP, Platform Engineering & Reliability

Description

Position at loanDepot

Position Summary:

Responsible for defining and executing the strategy for the company's Platform Engineering, DevOps, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) functions. This leader owns the reliability, scalability, security, operational governance, and engineering enablement capabilities of the platform ecosystem while enabling high-velocity, high-quality software delivery across engineering teams. The role operates at the intersection of architecture, operations, developer productivity, and platform governance, establishing technical direction, engineering standards, and operational maturity across the enterprise. This is a hands-on technical leadership role. While not expected to operate as an individual contributor on a daily basis, the leader must possess deep implementation credibility and be capable of reviewing, challenging, and guiding complex platform engineering decisions in depth. The successful candidate will have prior experience designing and operationalizing enterprise-grade CI/CD, observability, reliability, and platform governance capabilities in production environments.

Responsibilities:

• Establishing scalable and reliable platform engineering capabilities that improve developer velocity without sacrificing governance or operational integrity.
• Standardizing CI/CD, observability, deployment traceability, and operational controls across engineering organizations
• Improving production reliability, incident response effectiveness, and operational transparency
• Reducing deployment risk through automation, validation, and platform-enforced engineering standards
• Building internal platforms that are consumable, scalable, secure, and treated as products.
• Creating clear operational accountability through measurable reliability objectives, telemetry standards, and runtime visibility
• Enabling engineering teams to move faster while maintaining consistent enterprise standards
• Platform & Infrastructure Leadership:
• Define and execute the long-term strategy for platform engineering, DevOps, and reliability.
• Design and evolve scalable, secure, resilient, and operable platform architectures.
• Establish internal platforms as productized capabilities with defined roadmaps, SLAs, adoption metrics, and operational standards.
• Define enterprise-wide standards for deployment automation, observability, runtime traceability, and infrastructure governance.
• Drive consistency across cloud, containers, and deployment ecosystems while enabling appropriate team autonomy.
• DevOps & Engineering Enablement:
• Lead CI/CD strategy, automation, and engineering enablement initiatives across the organization.
• Establish best practices for infrastructure-as-code, configuration management, release governance, and environment consistency.
• Implement platform guardrails and automated controls that reduce operational variance without unnecessarily slowing engineering delivery.
• Ensure deployment pipelines support:, automated quality enforcement, artifact traceability and immutability, release validation, reproducible deployments and operational auditability.
• Drive standardization across heterogeneous tooling ecosystems while remaining technology-flexible where appropriate.
• Site Reliability Engineering:
• Lead the maturity and adoption of SRE principles and operational excellence practices.
• Define and operationalize SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, and incident management standards.
• Improve availability, scalability, performance, and resiliency across production systems.
• Establish standardized telemetry and distributed tracing practices across services and infrastructure.
• Ensure operational visibility supports rapid root-cause analysis and production recovery.
• Drive post-incident learning through blameless postmortems and systemic corrective actions.
• Reliability, Security & Compliance:
• Ensure platform capabilities meet enterprise security, compliance, and regulatory expectations.
• Build reliability, operational governance, and security into platform design by default.
• Partner closely with security, compliance, architecture, and engineering leadership teams
• Establish software supply chain governance practices, including deployment traceability, artifact lineage, and auditability.
• Improve operational transparency through standardized runtime metadata and observability practices.
• Organizational & Technical Leadership:
• Lead, mentor, and scale high-performing platform engineering, DevOps, and SRE teams.
• Establish a culture of operational ownership, engineering accountability, and continuous improvement.
• Balance developer productivity with platform governance and enterprise reliability requirements
• Influence engineering strategy and technical direction across organizational boundaries.
• Partner with executive leadership to align platform investments with business objectives, delivery goals, and operational risk management.
• Hands-On Technical Expectations:
• Candidates should demonstrate prior ownership and implementation experience in several of the following areas within production-scale environments:
• CI/CD & Release Engineering:
• Designing and governing enterprise CI/CD platforms and deployment automation strategies
• Implementing automated quality gates and release validation processes using modern CI/CD tooling
• Establishing end-to-end deployment traceability across source control, build, release, and runtime environments
• Managing artifact integrity, versioning, and immutable deployment practices
• Supporting complex or heterogeneous tooling ecosystems across engineering organizations
• Observability & Distributed Systems:
• Implementing enterprise observability strategies across distributed systems
• Establishing standardized telemetry practices using OpenTelemetry or equivalent technologies
• Implementing logs, metrics, traces, and correlation strategies that support effective production diagnostics.
• Integrating deployment and runtime metadata into observability workflows for operational analysis
• Platform & Container Engineering:
• Designing standardized containers and runtime strategies at organizational scale
• Establishing secure and maintainable image lifecycle practices
• Implementing environment consistency and operational standards across SDLC stages
• Designing reusable platform capabilities that reduce duplication and operational inconsistency.
• Production Reliability & Operational Engineering:
• Diagnosing and resolving complex production failures across application, infrastructure, and dependency layers
• Implementing resiliency and failure-handling patterns within distributed systems
• Improving operational recovery, incident response maturity, and service reliability
• Driving systemic operational improvements based on production learnings and reliability metrics.
• Signals This Role May Not Be the Right Fit: This role is likely not a fit for candidates whose experience is primarily limited to:
• Operating tools without ownership of platform standards, governance, or engineering enforcement models
• Managing teams without direct involvement in architecture, implementation guidance, or operational decision-making
• Reliance on manual operational controls in place of automated engineering governance
• Limited exposure to distributed systems reliability, observability, or production-scale operational troubleshooting
• Observability practices focused only on logging without broader telemetry and correlation strategies.
• Limited experience balancing engineering autonomy with enterprise operational standards

Requirements:

• 10+ years of engineering experience with deep expertise in platform engineering, cloud infrastructure, DevOps, SRE, or distributed systems
• Proven experience leading platform engineering, DevOps, infrastructure, or reliability organizations at scale
• Strong understanding of modern cloud and infrastructure ecosystems (AWS, Azure, GCP, or equivalent)
• Deep knowledge of distributed systems, operational engineering, automation, and reliability practices
• Demonstrated ability to operate effectively at both strategic and deeply technical levels.
• Strong executive communication, organizational leadership, and cross-functional influence skills
• Experience driving enterprise engineering standardization and operational maturity initiatives preferred.

Why work for #teamloanDepot:

• Competitive compensation package based on experience, skillset and overall fit for #TeamloanDepot.
• Inclusive, diverse, and collaborative culture where people from all backgrounds can thrive
• Work with other passionate, purposeful, and customer-centric people
• Extensive internal growth and professional development opportunities including tuition reimbursement
• Comprehensive benefits package including Medical/Dental/Vision
• Wellness program to support both mental and physical health
• Generous paid time off for both exempt and non-exempt positions

About loanDepot:

loanDepot (NYSE: LDI) is a digital commerce company committed to serving its customers throughout the home ownership journey. Since its launch in 2010, loanDepot has revolutionized the mortgage industry with a digital-first approach that makes it easier, faster, and less stressful to purchase or refinance a home. Today, loanDepot enables customers to achieve the American dream of homeownership through a broad suite of lending and real estate services that simplify one of life's most complex transactions. With headquarters in Southern California and offices nationwide, loanDepot is committed to serving the communities in which its team lives and works through a variety of local, regional, and national philanthropic efforts.

Base pay is one part of our total compensation package and is determined within a range. This provides the opportunity to progress as you grow and develop within a role. The base pay for this role is between $195,000 and $268,500. Your base pay will depend on multiple individualized factors, including your job-related knowledge/skills, qualifications, experience, and market location.

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity in our company. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.