Head of Platform Engineering - Control Plane

About this role

As the Head of Platform Engineering – Control Plane, you will lead the development and implementation of our platform control plane initiatives which include governance layer as a code and all control functions directing our execution plan. Your role is pivotal in building and scaling a highly flexible, scalable, governed execution plane.

You will: You will collaborate closely with cross-functional teams, stakeholders, and technology partners to develop and integrate automation solutions that drive business growth, improve customer experiences, and reduce operational costs.

You have: • Bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science, engineering, management or a related field. • Strong people leadership experience managing software engineering teams, including hiring, coaching, performance management, and developing senior technical talent. • Deep hands-on technical background designing, building, and operating distributed, cloud-native platform services in production. • Experience leading platform, infrastructure, developer platform, AI/ML platform, security platform, or other reusable enterprise engineering capabilities. • Ability to own the roadmap and delivery for control plane capabilities such as identity and access management, tenant boundaries, policy enforcement, approvals, evaluation gates, observability, auditability, FinOps, secrets management, and lifecycle/promotion workflows. • Strong understanding of enterprise governance, security, risk, compliance, and operational controls required to safely run AI or data-intensive systems in production. • Experience building reliable APIs, registries, workflow services, policy engines, or orchestration services with clear contracts for downstream engineering teams. • Proven ability to drive engineering excellence through architecture reviews, design standards, testing, CI/CD, observability, incident response, reliability practices, and operational metrics. • Ability to partner effectively with product, architecture, security, risk, compliance, operations, and domain engineering teams to turn ambiguous platform needs into scalable engineering outcomes. • Strong communication and influence skills, with the ability to simplify complex technical topics for senior stakeholders and align teams around platform standards. • High ownership mindset with a bias for durable, reusable platform capabilities over one-off solutions.

You will: • Experience with agentic AI systems, LLM platforms, model gateways, tool/action gateways, agent registries, evaluation frameworks, or AI developer tooling. • Familiarity with AI governance patterns such as prompt-injection defense, PII handling, output filtering, risk tiering, model/tool allow-lists, HITL controls, and audit trails. • Experience with AWS-based platform engineering, including services such as Bedrock, SageMaker, Lambda, DynamoDB, API Gateway, EKS, IAM, CloudWatch, and related DevOps tooling. • Experience designing or operating multi-tenant platforms with RBAC/ABAC, entitlement models, service accounts, policy-as-code, and secure cross-account or cross-environment access patterns. • Knowledge of observability, tracing, telemetry, cost attribution, and platform-level operational dashboards for enterprise-scale systems. • Experience establishing developer-friendly paved roads, reference architectures, templates, SDKs, CLI tools, or self-service workflows that improve adoption and reduce support burden. • Experience working in regulated environments where security, compliance, data residency, retention, and auditability are first-class platform requirements. • Background in MLOps, LLMOps, AIOps, model lifecycle management, or production AI operations. • Experience with vendor integration strategies that preserve portability and avoid lock-in through stable platform interfaces and clear architectural contracts. • Comfort operating in a matrixed, global organization with onshore/offshore teams, multiple stakeholders, and evolving platform priorities.

Location: • New York, New Jersey or Pennsylvania

• Up to 10% travel within US

Our promise: •  At Guardian, you’ll have the support and flexibility to achieve your professional and personal goals. •  Through skill-building, leadership development and philanthropic opportunities, we provide opportunities to build communities and grow your career, surrounded by diverse colleagues with high ethical standards

We offer: • Meaningful and challenging work opportunities to accelerate technology and innovation in a secure and compliant way • Competitive compensation • Excellent medical, dental, supplemental health, life and vision coverage for you and your dependents with no wait period • Life and disability insurance • A great 401(k) with match • Tuition assistance, paid parental leave and backup family care • Dynamic, modern work environments that promote collaboration and creativity • Flexible time off, dress code, and work location policies to balance your work and life in the ways that suit you best • Social responsibility in all aspects of our work. We volunteer within our local communities, create educational alliances with colleges, drive a variety of initiatives in sustainability, and advocate for diversity and inclusion in all that we do.

About Guardian: Every day, Guardian provides Americans the security they deserve through our insurance and wealth management products and services. Since our founding in 1860, our long-term view has helped our customers prepare for whatever life brings whether starting a family, planning for the future or taking care of employees. Today, we're a Fortune 250 mutual company and a leading provider of life, disability, dental, and other benefits for individuals, at the workplace and through government sponsored programs. The Guardian community of 9,500 employees and our network of over 2,700 financial representatives is committed to serving with expertise when, where and how our clients need us. Our commitments res

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