Sr. Director, Platform Engineering

Welcome to the intersection of energy and home services. At NRG, we’re driven by our passion to create a smarter, cleaner and more connected future.

Vivint Smart Home, an NRG owned company, is a leading smart home company in the United States, dedicated to redefining the home experience with intelligent products and services. We find purpose in proactively protecting and keeping our customers connected to home, no matter where they are. Join the Smart Home team to create smarter, safer and more sustainable homes.

About the Role

Vivint is seeking a Senior Director of Platform Engineering to lead the backend engineering teams that power our smart home and energy management platforms. Reporting to the SVP of Engineering, this leader owns Vivint's backend cloud services and APIs, core infrastructure, data and streaming pipelines, and the integrations that connect Vivint to other parts of the business and to strategic third-party partners. The Platform organization delivers the services that millions of Vivint customers depend on every day.

Primary Responsibilities

• Leadership & Team Development
  • Lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing organization of software engineers and SREs.
  • Foster a culture of reliability, operational excellence, and engineering rigor.
  • Define career paths, set performance expectations, and invest in the growth of every engineer.
  • Partner with recruiting to attract top platform engineering talent.
• Technical Strategy & Architecture
  • Set the multi-year technical direction and roadmap for the Platform organization, balancing near-term delivery with long-term technical health.
  • Define the architectural vision for Vivint's cloud platform, ensuring it is resilient, secure, cost-efficient, and scalable for future growth.
  • Drive modern platform practices: CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, observability, and automation that improve backend delivery velocity and quality.
• Backend Services & Reliability
  • Own the reliability, availability, and performance of the backend services that power the Vivint smart home experience.
  • Establish and enforce SLOs, error budgets, and incident management practices that reflect Vivint's commitment to customer uptime.
  • Manage infrastructure cost-effectively as the platform grows.

Required Qualifications:

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with 5+ years in engineering leadership roles overseeing backend or SRE teams.
• Deep expertise in cloud and data center architecture, distributed systems, and large-scale backend service design.
• Strong background in container orchestration and modern CI/CD practices.
• Experience establishing SLOs, on-call practices, and incident response programs in a 24/7 production environment.
• Proven ability to define and execute multi-year platform roadmaps in a cloud or IoT product company.
• B.S. in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field.
• Some travel is required.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience building backends for IoT or connected-device platforms.
• Familiarity with major cloud providers.
• Experience with Kubernetes and container orchestration.
• Familiarity with streaming and messaging technologies (Kafka, RabbitMQ, MQTT).
• Experience operating MongoDB at scale.
• Background in platform security including API security, secrets management, and zero-trust networking.

Why You'll Love Working Here

Learn about the Vivint Culture and why it's a great place to grow your career! Here are some highlighted perks you should ask us about:

• Paid holidays and flexible paid time away
• Employee/Friends/Family Discounts
• Medical/dental/vision/life coverage
• 401(k) + Employer Match
• Employee Resource Groups
• Annual Bonus
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Quarterly Innovation Weeks

Working Conditions

This job operates in a professional office environment. This role routinely uses standard office equipment.

Safety

Vivint enforces a safety culture whereby all employees have the responsibility for continuously developing and maintaining a safe working environment. Each new employee is responsible for completing all training requirements. Additionally, the employee must accept they have responsibility for maintaining the safety of themselves, their co-workers, and the public. Employee must adhere to all written and verbal instructions, promptly report and correct all hazards or unsafe conditions, question non-standard operations or unmitigated hazards, and provide feedback to management on all safety issues.

NRG Energy is committed to a drug and alcohol-free workplace. To the extent permitted by law and any applicable collective bargaining agreement, employees are subject to periodic random drug testing, and post-accident and reasonable suspicion drug and alcohol testing. EOE AA M/F/Vet/Disability. Level, Title and/or Salary may be adjusted based on the applicant's experience or skills.

The base salary range for this position is: $228,880- $377,640* *The base salary range above represents the low and high end of the salary range for this position. Actual salaries will vary based on several factors including but not limited to location, experience, and performance. The range listed is just one component of the total compensation package for employees. Other rewards may include annual bonus, short- and long-term incentives, and program-specific awards. In addition the position may be eligible to participate in the benefits program which include, but are not limited to, medical, vision, dental, 401K, and flexible spending accounts.  

NRG Energy is committed to a drug and alcohol-free workplace. To the extent permitted by law and any applicable collective bargaining agreement, employees are subject to periodic random drug testing, and post-accident and reasonable suspicion drug and alcohol testing. EOE AA M/F/Protected Veteran Status/Disability. Level, Title and/or Salary may be adjusted based on the applicant's experience or skills.

EEO is the Law Poster (The poster can be found at http://www.eeoc.gov/employers/upload/poster_screen_reader_optimized.pdf)

Official description on file with Talent.