The Director of Platform & Performance Engineering leads backend engineering, focusing on scalability, performance, and operational resilience of SaaS platform services, while managing a high-performing team.
As the most trusted global leader in data-first contract lifecycle management (CLM) software, Agiloft helps organizations manage the end-to-end process of proposing, negotiating, signing, and leveraging contracts using our flexible Data-first Agreement Platform (DAP). With contract data as the foundation, customers quickly and collaboratively reach agreement and leverage contract visibility to thrive with competitive advantage. Employing powerful, pragmatic artificial intelligence as a legal force multiplier, and robust integration capabilities as a data liberator, organizations around the world trust Agiloft’s certified implementers to deliver connected, intelligent, and autonomous solutions across the entire contract lifecycle.
Top analysts like Gartner, Forrester, and IDC agree, all showing Agiloft as a leader in the CLM space. Our no code platform is easily managed and administered by business users, which is why Agiloft is the contract you keep: nearly a full 100% of new customers are satisfied with their initial implementations, and some 97% of customers renew every year. Ours is a growing, vibrant, successful company that is at the forefront of a market that is becoming a must-have for all organizations.
We believe that the way to build the strongest, most vibrant place to work is to bring in individuals from all walks of life, and to support them in bringing their authentic selves to their day, every day. Our working philosophy is that “EX = CX”: when employee experience is excellent, so is customer experience. We support multiple Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), and offer a working environment that supports healthy work/life balance, including floating holidays and a quarterly, no-questions-asked wellness day.
The Director of Platform & Performance Engineering is a hands-on technical leader responsible for accelerating the scalability, performance, and operational resilience of our backend SaaS platform services. As a leader in the AI-driven CLM space, we are rapidly expanding product capabilities and customer scale — and this role ensures our backend platform not only keeps pace but enables that growth.
Reporting directly to the Chief Technology Officer, this leader will build and lead a strong, accountable backend engineering team focused on improving and evolving the technical foundation and performance of our core platform and data services.
This role works closely with application engineering, Cloud Operations, and Product leadership to ensure platform investments directly accelerate product velocity, customer value, and innovation.
This is a deeply technical player–coach role requiring strong hands-on expertise in backend services, distributed architectures, database performance engineering, and production-scale troubleshooting.
Mission of the Role
- Rapidly improves scalability, reliability, and observability of the core backend platform
- Establishes systematic load testing, regression detection, and performance benchmarking practices
- Drives measurable reductions in latency, error rates, and infrastructure cost per transaction
- Leverages modern tooling, including AI-assisted analysis, to accelerate bottleneck identification and remediation
- Partners closely with application engineering and Cloud Operations to ensure platform stability under real-world production load
Build and lead a high-performing Core Platform Engineering team that:
Job Responsibilities
- Own and drive the performance, scalability, and reliability roadmap for the backend platform in close partnership with the CTO and engineering leaders, ensuring the platform scales with aggressive product and customer growth.
- Prioritize performance and stability investments while balancing near-term delivery commitments. Performance & Scalability Engineering
- Establish practical performance engineering practices, including load testing, benchmarking, and regression detection.
- Proactively identify and eliminate performance bottlenecks to ensure fast, responsive user experiences at scale.
- Design and execute realistic production-scale load testing scenarios that mirror customer behavior.
- Establish performance regression gates in CI/CD pipelines.
- Drive systematic root-cause analysis of production performance incidents.
- Quantify and publish performance baselines and improvement targets.
- Establish performance baselines and drive measurable improvements in throughput, latency, and resource efficiency. Backend & Database Engineering
- Drive excellence in relational database architecture across MySQL and PostgreSQL environments in AWS (RDS/Aurora).
- Lead database optimization strategies, indexing improvements, and schema evolution practices.
- Partner with Cloud Operations to align infrastructure and data-layer scaling strategies.
- Improve transactional integrity, concurrency handling, and data reliability at scale.
- Lead query optimization initiatives based on real production workload analysis.
- Identify and resolve lock contention, connection pool saturation, and concurrency bottlenecks.
- Partner with Cloud Operations to right-size database infrastructure based on performance data. Observability & Runtime Intelligence
- Strengthen metrics instrumentation, structured logging and tracing across backend services.
- Partner with SRE and Cloud Operations to enhance diagnostic capabilities and operational transparency.
- Define measurable performance and reliability KPIs.
- Ensure comprehensive instrumentation across critical backend paths.
- Correlate load testing results with runtime metrics and tracing data.
- Improve mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to resolve (MTTR) for performance incidents. Hands-On Technical Leadership
- Engage directly in cross-team architectural design reviews, complex system decisions, and strategic refactoring initiatives.
- Provide technical mentorship and elevate backend engineering standards.
- Balance strategic direction-setting with practical, hands-on execution where needed.
- Serve as a senior escalation point for complex backend performance or architectural challenges.
- Clarify backend platform ownership boundaries in partnership with Product Engineering and Cloud Operations. Organizational Leadership
- Recruit and develop a team of strong backend, database, and platform engineers.
- Set clear expectations for engineering rigor, delivery accountability, and code quality.
- Foster a culture of accountability, speed, craftsmanship, and continuous improvement.
- Partner effectively with Product Engineering and Cloud Operations to ensure cohesive platform evolution.
- Build a strong team capable of independently owning critical platform domains.
- Influence engineering standards and platform practices across multiple application teams through collaboration and technical leadership.
Platform Strategy & Roadmap
Other duties as assigned
Required Qualifications
- 12+ years of backend engineering experience, including senior technical leadership roles.
- Deep hands-on expertise with Java (JEE, Spring, or comparable enterprise frameworks).
- Strong proficiency in Python for tooling, automation, or services development.
- Strong understanding of distributed systems, concurrency, and scalable SaaS architectures
- Experience designing and implementing load tests.
- Experience using performance, observability, and scalability testing tools (Grafana, Jmeter, query EXPLAIN/ANALYZE, OpenTelemetry).
- Strong expertise in performance optimization of relational database access patterns, including MySQL and PostgreSQL.
- Experience evolving large-scale applications toward modular or microservices-based architectures.
- Familiarity with containerization technologies (Docker, Kubernetes).
- Experience using modern engineering tools, including AI-assisted development tools, to improve productivity and code quality.
- Ability to apply AI tools pragmatically while maintaining architectural integrity and engineering standards.
- Demonstrated ability to collaborate effectively across engineering, infrastructure, and product organizations.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience supporting enterprise SaaS platforms at significant scale.
- Familiarity with performance tuning and profiling tools.
- Experience implementing distributed tracing frameworks.
- Experience partnering closely with infrastructure and SRE teams in AWS environments.
- Background in enterprise workflow or data-intensive platforms.
- Experience designing reusable platform services or shared data infrastructure within a growing SaaS environment.
Agiloft offers a comprehensive benefits package for US employees including but not limited to the following:
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance
- Short term and long-term disability
- Life insurance and AD&D
- Supplemental life insurance (Employee/Spouse/Child)
- Health care and dependent care Flexible Spending Accounts
- 401(k) with company match
- Paid time off: Flexible Vacation is provided to all eligible employees assigned to a salaried (non-overtime eligible) position.
- Paid parental leave
- Voluntary benefits including pet insurance
Ensuring a diverse and inclusive workplace is our priority. We are committed to an environment of acceptance where you are free to bring your full self to work. All employment decisions at Agiloft are based on business needs, job requirements, and individual qualifications without regard to race, color, religion or belief, national or social ethnic origin, sex, age, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, parental status, marital status, Veteran status, or any other status protected by the laws or regulations in the locations where we operate. If you have a need that requires accommodation during the recruiting process, please let us know by contacting Director, Talent Acquisition, Brad Toothman at [email protected].
Applicants from underrepresented groups such as minorities, veterans, or individuals with disabilities encouraged to apply.
Applications will be reviewed as submitted. There will be no application deadline for this opportunity.
Top Skills
Docker
Grafana
Java
Jmeter
Kubernetes
MySQL
Opentelemetry
Postgres
Python
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