Want to know if this job is worth applying to?
Deerfield, Illinois, United States
Onsite
Position Summary
Life Time is the nation's only Healthy Way of Life brand. As we transform our technology foundation, the Senior Director of Platform Engineering owns how Life Time builds, operates, and evolves its core platforms — cloud, data center, identity and access, storage, and the internal services that let every engineering team move faster.
This leader is an engineer first and a product thinker by practice. They treat internal engineering teams as customers and build platforms accordingly. Reliability is a feature. Self-service is a design goal. The mandate is the shift from reactive operations to proactive, product-driven engineering.
Key Responsibilities
Platform Engineering
Lead the design, build, and operation of cloud, data center, and hybrid infrastructure on engineering-first principles.
Drive IaC adoption so infrastructure is version-controlled, peer-reviewed, and deployed through automated pipelines — manual change is the exception.
Own capacity planning, lifecycle management, and modernization of on-prem data center and storage.
Define the hybrid-cloud strategy: what stays on-prem, what moves, and the engineering path to get there.
Site Reliability & Operational Excellence
Establish SRE practices: SLOs/SLAs, error budgets, and reliability data that drives investment.
Shift the model from incident response to failure prevention — observable, self-healing platforms designed for graceful degradation.
Champion blameless postmortems and engineering-led root cause analysis.
Identity & Access Management
Own and modernize the enterprise identity platform: directory services, PAM, and SSO/federation.
Partner with Security to reduce standing access, enforce least privilege, and enable secure self-service.
Internal Developer Platform & Developer Experience
Run the internal developer platform as a product, with a prioritized backlog, adoption metrics, and developer satisfaction as a north-star KPI.
Give teams frictionless self-service access to compute, secrets, and deployment tooling — the best platform interaction needs no ticket.
Leadership & Financial Management
Build and grow a high-performing team — hiring for engineering depth, developing people, and fostering ownership.
Manage operating and capital budgets transparently, framing investment in terms of reliability, velocity, and risk.
Communicate strategy, risks, and progress to executive stakeholders in business terms.
Qualifications
Minimum
15+ years in infrastructure or platform engineering, including 7+ leading engineering teams.
Hands-on fluency with IaC tooling (Terraform required; Ansible a plus).
Demonstrated experience building or maturing an SRE or platform engineering function — not just running ops.
Architectural-level knowledge of AWS and/or Azure (networking, compute, identity, storage, cost).
Experience owning an enterprise identity platform (Active Directory, Entra ID, Okta, or equivalent) and Zero Trust principles.
Proven ability to shift team culture and practices toward engineering excellence.
Bachelor's in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Preferred
Building an internal developer platform or self-service infrastructure layer.
GitOps tooling (ArgoCD, Flux).
Kubernetes and container orchestration at scale.
Observability stack ownership (OpenTelemetry, Datadog, Grafana).
Compliance frameworks: SOX, PCI, HIPAA.
Consumer-facing or multi-site retail/hospitality technology.
All team members receive the following benefits while working for Life Time:
A fully subsidized membership
Discounts on Life Time products and services
401(k) retirement savings plan with company discretionary match (21 years of age and older)
Training and professional development
Paid sick leave where required by law
Full-time Team Members are eligible for additional benefits, including:
Medical, dental, vision, and prescription drug coverage
Short term and long term disability insurance
Life insurance
Pre-tax flexible spending and dependent care plans
Parental leave and adoption assistance
Paid time off, including 5 to 20 vacation days per calendar year (based on tenure) and paid sick leave
Deferred compensation plan, if the team member meets the required income threshold
Life Time is a place for everyone. As an organization, we are committed to an inclusive, diverse and equitable workplace that respects and celebrates the unique contributions of each individual while ensuring we remain an equal opportunity employer that recruits, hires, trains and promotes based on merit and qualifications.