Senior Director, Developer Platforms

Company

Cox Automotive - USA

Engineering / Product Development

Sr Director, Software Engineering

Sr DirectorHybrid - Ability to work remotely part of the week

Yes, 5% of the time

Day

Compensation

Compensation includes a base salary in the range of $197,600.00 - $329,400.00. The base salary may vary within the anticipated base pay range based on factors such as the ultimate location of the position and the selected candidate’s knowledge, skills, and abilities. Position may be eligible for additional compensation that may include an incentive program.

ROLE OVERVIEW 

Cox Automotive is one of the largest technology service providers in the automotive industry, supporting thousands of workloads and hundreds of engineering and product teams across a portfolio of market-leading brands. The Sr Director, Developer Platforms owns the end-to-end product engineering toolchain that makes all of that possible—from AI-native development tools and the core engineering ecosystem, to the engineering data plane, operational monitoring tooling, and the secure cloud landing zone on AWS. This leader is at the center of the software engineering transformation: as AI-assisted and agentic development tools fundamentally change how software is built, the Developer Platforms team sets the direction for how Cox Automotive engineers and product builders harness that shift, creating the paved roads and optimized environments that let hundreds of teams ship great software quickly and confidently. 

  

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES 

Strategic Leadership 

• Partner with senior Engineering and Product leaders across Cox Automotive's business units to deeply understand the Developer experience and continuously reduce the friction that slow teams down 

• Partner with Architecture, Engineering, and Product leaders to define and execute the multi-year Developer Platforms strategy, stewarding the vision for Cox Automotive's internal developer platform and the end-to-end Developer experience across discovery, development, delivery, and operations 

• Lead Cox Automotive's transformation toward AI-assisted and agentic engineering—moving beyond individual developer tooling to optimizing the entire engineering environment for how autonomous agents and humans work together to build software 

• Establish the "paved road" philosophy: create opinionated, well-lit paths and self-service capabilities that let hundreds of teams move fast without re-inventing foundational infrastructure or tooling 

• Own the strategy for AI-native development tools including coding assistants, agentic development platforms, and enterprise MCP infrastructure—ensuring Cox Automotive engineers have access to best-in-class AI capabilities and that those tools are deeply integrated into the Developer environment 

• Drive the roadmap for the engineering data plane—giving engineering and product leadership meaningful visibility into the health and quality of workloads across the enterprise 

• Represent Developer Platforms as a strategic enterprise capability to executive stakeholders, translating platform investment into measurable outcomes in developer productivity, quality, and speed to market 

 

Operational Excellence 

• Ensure availability, reliability, and performance commitments are met across the full Developer Platforms toolchain—including AI development tools, engineering ecosystem (GitHub, Artifactory, CI/CD), engineering data plane, operational observability (Splunk, New Relic, PagerDuty), and the AWS cloud landing zone 

• Establish and track key performance indicators spanning developer satisfaction, platform adoption, deployment frequency, onboarding time, mean time to recovery, and agentic environment readiness metrics 

• Drive continuous improvement in platform efficiency and cost optimization across cloud infrastructure, toolchain operations, and vendor-managed services 

• Oversee security and compliance posture of the engineering toolchain, including the secure AWS landing zone, in partnership with Enterprise Security 

• Lead incident response and problem management for critical platform events that impact engineering teams across the enterprise 

• Maintain robust feedback loops with internal customers—engineers, architects, product managers—to continuously measure and improve the Developer experience at scale 

 

Organization Leadership 

• Lead a multi-disciplinary platform organization spanning AI-native developer tooling, core engineering ecosystem, engineering data plane, operational tooling, and secure cloud infrastructure 

• Build high-performing teams through strategic hiring, talent development, and succession planning across platform engineering and developer experience disciplines 

• Foster a culture rooted in developer empathy, platform thinking, continuous learning, and a bias for enabling others to go faster 

• Manage performance, compensation, and career development for direct reports; develop the next generation of platform engineering leaders 

• Attract and retain top talent in the increasingly competitive platform engineering and developer experience space 

 

Financial & Vendor Management 

• Own the Developer Platforms budget, driving cost optimization across cloud, tooling, and vendor services 

• Manage strategic vendor relationships across the core engineering toolchain and cloud ecosystem 

• Build clear business cases for platform investments tied to productivity, quality, and speed 

• Enforce cost discipline through consolidation, automation, and toolchain rationalization 

 

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS 

• 12+ years in software engineering or platform engineering, with 5+ years in senior leadership roles running platform or developer experience functions at enterprise scale 

• Deep, hands-on familiarity with the modern engineering toolchain: source control and developer workflows (GitHub or equivalent), artifact management (Artifactory or equivalent), CI/CD pipeline platforms, and container/Kubernetes runtime environments 

• Proven track record building or scaling an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) or developer experience function, including self-service capabilities, golden paths, and developer portals 

• Demonstrated experience leading operational observability and monitoring toolchains—including log aggregation, APM, and incident management platforms—at large scale 

• Hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure and secure cloud landing zone design, preferably on AWS, including infrastructure-as-code practices (Terraform or equivalent) 

• Experience implementing AI-augmented developer capabilities—including AI coding assistants, agentic development workflows, or LLM-integrated toolchain automation—and a clear vision for where this space is heading 

• Strong understanding of modern software delivery practices: DevOps, GitOps, feature flagging, progressive delivery, and observability-driven development 

• Ability to lead through influence across a large, matrixed enterprise with hundreds of engineering teams 

• Track record translating platform strategy into business value narratives for executive audiences 

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent experience 

 

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS 

• Experience optimizing engineering environments for agentic AI workflows—understanding how autonomous coding agents interact with source control, pipelines, test frameworks, and deployment infrastructure 

• Background implementing enterprise developer portals and IDP frameworks (Backstage, Port, or equivalent), including integration with engineering data and metrics 

• Familiarity with enterprise MCP (Model Context Protocol) ecosystems and AI-native toolchain architectures 

• Experience applying developer experience measurement frameworks including DORA metrics, SPACE framework, and developer satisfaction surveys at enterprise scale 

• Background in automotive, retail, or other complex multi-business-unit enterprises serving a large internal engineering customer base 

• Experience leading engineering data and observability strategy—including engineering insights platforms, workload health dashboards, and developer productivity analytics 

• Relevant certifications in cloud (AWS), platform tooling (GitHub, HashiCorp), or DevOps practices 

 

SUCCESS IN FIRST 12 MONTHS 

• Develop and gain alignment on a unified Developer Platforms strategy and roadmap that connects AI-native tooling, the core engineering ecosystem, the engineering data plane, operational tooling, and secure cloud infrastructure into a coherent vision for the Developer experience 

• Deliver measurable advances in Cox Automotive's agentic engineering readiness—including expanded rollout of AI coding assistants, a defined strategy for optimizing the environment for agentic workflows, and enterprise MCP infrastructure availability 

• Establish a baseline set of Developer experience metrics (developer satisfaction, deployment frequency, platform onboarding time, DORA metrics) and publish the first enterprise-wide engineering productivity report 

• Launch or substantially mature the internal developer portal as the self-service starting point for engineering and product teams across the enterprise 

• Demonstrate progress toward measurable "paved road" adoption—reduce the time and friction for teams to onboard to standard tooling, CI/CD patterns, and cloud infrastructure 

• Maintain or improve SLA commitments and operational reliability across the full Developer Platforms toolchain through organizational transition 

• Establish trusted, collaborative relationships with peer Sr Directors, business unit engineering leaders, and senior product stakeholders across Cox Automotive 

To be employed in this role, you’ll need to clear a pre-employment drug test. Cox Automotive does not currently administer a pre-employment drug test for marijuana for this position. However, we are a drug-free workplace, so the possession, use or being under the influence of drugs illegal under federal or state law during work hours, on company property and/or in company vehicles is prohibited.

The Company offers eligible employees the flexibility to take as much vacation with pay as they deem consistent with their duties, the company’s needs, and its obligations; seven paid holidays throughout the calendar year; and up to 160 hours of paid wellness annually for their own wellness or that of family members. Employees are also eligible for additional paid time off in the form of bereavement leave, time off to vote, jury duty leave, volunteer time off, military leave, and parental leave.Through groundbreaking technology and a commitment to stellar experiences for drivers and dealers alike, Cox Automotive employees are transforming the way the world buys, owns, sells – or simply uses – cars. Cox Automotive employees get to work on iconic consumer brands like Autotrader and Kelley Blue Book and industry-leading dealer-facing companies like vAuto and Manheim, all while enjoying the people-centered atmosphere that is central to our life at Cox. Benefits of working at Cox may include health care insurance (medical, dental, vision), retirement planning (401(k)), and paid days off (sick leave, parental leave, flexible vacation/wellness days, and/or PTO). For more details on what benefits you may be offered, visit our benefits page. Cox is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer – All qualified applicants/employees will receive consideration for employment without regard to that individual’s age, race, color, religion or creed, national origin or ancestry, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, physical or mental disability, veteran status, genetic information, ethnicity, citizenship, or any other characteristic protected by law. Cox provides reasonable accommodations when requested by a qualified applicant or employee with disability, unless such accommodations would cause an undue hardship.