---
title: 'Director of Engineering, Platform (Runtime & Stateful Systems) at Sentry'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/director-of-engineering-platform-runtime-stateful-systems-sentry-san-francisco-x486v5zq0shj'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-30'
---

# Director of Engineering, Platform (Runtime & Stateful Systems) at Sentry

- **Company:** Sentry
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-10-24
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-30
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sentry/b7c17591-c9f1-449a-b0c1-39f2d6ff650e

## Job description

## About Sentry

Software runs the world and the pace is faster than ever. Sentry helps developers fix errors and performance issues before users notice, so teams can spend less time firefighting and more time building. Trusted by 200,000+ organizations, Sentry is today’s application monitoring standard and our team is building its AI-native future.

## About the role

We're looking for an experienced engineering leader to own one of the most critical areas within Platform: the runtime and stateful systems Sentry runs on. You'll lead multiple engineering teams and Staff engineers responsible for OLTP and OLAP databases, real-time compute and stream processing, blob storage, and distributed caching.

These systems power Sentry's products, including Seer, and are mission-critical to the business. When they perform well, every product team moves faster. When they don't, the whole company feels the impact.

You'll set the technical vision across these systems, lead significant architectural changes, and develop the engineering leaders and teams responsible for building and operating them. This role requires someone who brings deep technical judgment, thinks strategically, and has a track record of driving complex engineering initiatives from concept through execution.

You'll have the opportunity to shape both the technical direction and organizational growth of a critical part of Sentry's platform as our products and infrastructure continue to evolve.

This is a hybrid role based in the San Francisco Bay Area, with an expectation of working from our San Francisco office three days per week.

In This Role You Will

- Lead multiple engineering teams and Staff engineers responsible for the runtime and stateful systems supporting Sentry, Seer, and the products built on top of them.
- Set the technical vision and strategy across multiple systems, identifying opportunities to evolve our architecture as the business scales.
- Drive significant architectural changes and technical initiatives, making informed tradeoffs around scalability, reliability, performance, cost, and complexity.
- Provide technical leadership across teams, working closely with senior engineers to evaluate architectural decisions, challenge assumptions, and establish technical direction.
- Own the execution and operational excellence of mission-critical systems, ensuring teams deliver reliable, scalable, and high-performing platform components.
- Build and develop a strong engineering organization, including hiring, mentoring, and growing engineering managers and senior technical leaders.
- Foster a culture of engineering excellence, technical accountability, and continuous improvement.
- Partner across Platform, Infrastructure, and Product to align priorities, navigate ambiguity, and deliver complex, cross-functional initiatives.
- Anticipate evolving product and infrastructure needs, identifying opportunities to build new platform capabilities and improve existing systems.

You'll love this job if you

- Enjoy solving complex distributed systems problems and have strong opinions about architecture, backed by experience and sound technical judgment.
- Thrive in roles where you're equally responsible for technical direction, execution, and developing engineering leaders.
- Like taking ownership of ambiguous technical challenges, establishing a clear strategy, and bringing teams together to execute.
- Are passionate about building large-scale systems where reliability, performance, and efficiency directly impact the business.
- Enjoy partnering with senior engineers, challenging technical assumptions, and helping teams make thoughtful architectural decisions.
- Take pride in building high-performing teams, developing future leaders, and raising the engineering bar.
- Want to shape the runtime foundation supporting Sentry's products and AI capabilities for years to come.

## Qualifications

- 12+ years of experience in backend, platform, or infrastructure engineering, with significant experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems.
- Director-level engineering management experience, or equivalent senior engineering leadership experience overseeing multiple teams at comparable scale and complexity.
- Deep technical expertise in at least one of the following domains:
- OLTP databases
- OLAP databases
- Real-time compute and stream processing
- Blob/object storage
- Distributed caching
- Demonstrated experience driving significant architectural changes, including evaluating technical tradeoffs, establishing direction, and leading implementation.
- Strong technical judgment and the ability to engage deeply in architectural discussions across multiple distributed systems domains.
- Proven track record of leading complex, cross-functional engineering initiatives from strategy through execution, with measurable technical or business impact.
- Experience hiring, developing, and leading engineering managers and senior technical talent.
- Strong communication and organizational leadership skills, with the ability to articulate technical concepts, influence senior stakeholders, and align teams around a shared strategy.
- Experience operating mission-critical infrastructure with a strong understanding of reliability, scalability, performance, and operational efficiency.

The base salary range that Sentry reasonably expects to pay for this position is $300,000 to $450,000 USD, plus an annual performance bonus of up to 20% of base salary. A successful candidate’s actual base salary amount will be determined by a variety of relevant factors including, without limitation, the candidate’s work location, education, work and other relevant experience, skills, and job-related knowledge. A successful candidate will be eligible to participate in Sentry’s employee benefit plans/programs applicable to the candidate’s position (including incentive compensation, equity grants, paid time off, and group health insurance coverage). See [Sentry Benefits](https://sentry.io/careers/) for more details about the Company’s benefit plans/programs.

## Equal Opportunity at Sentry

Sentry is committed to providing equal employment opportunities to its employees and candidates for employment regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, veteran status, or other legally-protected characteristic. This commitment includes the provision of reasonable accommodations to employees and candidates for employment with physical or mental disabilities who require such accommodations in order to (a) perform the essential functions of their jobs, or (b) seek employment with Sentry. We strive to build a diverse team, with an inclusive culture where every teammate can thrive. Sentry is an open-source company because we believe that everyone, everywhere, should have the ability and tools to make great software. Software should be accessible. That starts with making our industry accessible. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, you may contact us at accommodations@sentry.io. Want to learn more about how Sentry handles applicant data? Get the details in our [Applicant Privacy Policy](https://sentry.io/careers/applicantprivacy/).

## About Sentry

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Sentry is the leading application performance monitoring and error-tracking platform that helps developers diagnose, fix, and optimize code in real-time.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series E)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2012
- **Founders**: David Cramer, Chris Jennings

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Error Tracking Software
- **Target customers**: B2B; developers and engineering teams at organizations of all sizes, from startups to large enterprises (200K+ organizations)
- **Mission or purpose**: To give every developer the tools to build better software, faster, by making debugging and performance monitoring accessible and indispensable.

## Products & Services
- **Sentry Error Tracking**: The core product — real-time error monitoring that captures, aggregates, and surfaces software bugs across 100+ coding languages and frameworks. [sentry.io](https://sentry.io/welcome/)
- **Sentry Performance Monitoring**: Traces slow transactions, API calls, and database queries to help developers optimize application speed and reliability. [sentry.io](https://sentry.io/welcome/)
- **Sentry Session Replay**: Video-like replays of user sessions to see exactly what happened before, during, and after an error. [sentry.io](https://sentry.io/welcome/)
- **Sentry Profiling**: Continuous code profiling to identify performance bottlenecks at the function level. [sentry.io](https://sentry.io/welcome/)
- **Sentry Crash Reporting (Cocoa/Android)**: Native SDKs for mobile error tracking and performance monitoring. [sentry.io](https://sentry.io/welcome/)
- **Seer (AI Debugging Agent)**: An AI-powered tool that uses Sentry context (logs, commits, traces) to automatically root-cause issues and generate merge-ready patches. [sentry.io](https://sentry.io/welcome/)
- **Sentry MCP Server**: Integrates with coding agents to bring full debugging context directly into the developer's workflow. [sentry.io](https://sentry.io/welcome/)

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed (last known funding round was $217M total raised)
- **Key Metric**: $217M total funding raised across 6 rounds; processes 190B+ events daily; serves 200K+ customers and 4M+ total users across 146 countries [sentry.io](https://sentry.io/about/)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Backed by prominent venture capital firms (specific names not listed on the about page, but the company has raised significant capital). Key integrations include GitHub, Slack, Jira, and Linear. [sentry.io](https://sentry.io/welcome/)
- **Growth Signals**: Acquired Codecov in December 2022 to expand into code coverage; processes 790B+ events per month; has 200+ employees across offices in San Francisco, Vienna, Toronto, Amsterdam, New York, and Sydney. [sentry.io](https://sentry.io/about/)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Developer-First DNA**: Built by developers for developers, with an open-source heritage that fosters deep trust and community adoption.
- **Unified Observability Platform**: Uniquely connects errors, logs, session replays, traces, profiles, and metrics under a single trace ID, providing end-to-end context that competitors like Datadog or New Relic offer as separate products.
- **AI-Native Debugging**: Seer, the AI debugger, goes beyond simple alerting to automatically root-cause issues and generate patches, a significant moat in the AI-assisted development space.
- **Massive Scale & Community**: Loved by millions of developers and 200K organizations, with 190B+ events processed daily, creating a powerful network effect and data advantage for AI models. [sentry.io](https://sentry.io/about/)

## Strategic Focus
- **AI-Powered Developer Tools**: Deep investment in AI (Seer, AI code review, AI evals) to move from passive monitoring to proactive debugging and automated fixing.
- **Unified Observability**: Continuing to break down silos between errors, performance, logs, and replays into a single, trace-connected experience.
- **Platform Expansion**: Growing beyond error tracking into a full-stack observability and developer productivity platform, including code coverage (via Codecov acquisition) and AI-assisted development.
- **Enterprise Scale**: Building out capabilities for large organizations (enterprise product marketing, solutions engineering, security compliance) while maintaining a strong developer experience.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture & Values**: Emphasizes "pixels matter" (attention to detail), constructive feedback, iteration, and valuing people from diverse backgrounds. The culture is described as relatively small, fast-growing, and highly influential. [sentry.io](https://sentry.io/careers/)
- **Remote/Hybrid Policy**: Offers roles across multiple global offices (San Francisco, Toronto, Vienna, Amsterdam, New York, Sydney) with a mix of in-office and remote positions. The careers page lists specific locations for each role. [sentry.io](https://sentry.io/careers/)
- **Notable Perks**: Competitive compensation + equity, flexible PTO, paid parental leave, medical/dental/vision insurance, 401k plan (US), commuter benefits, professional development stipend, charitable matching program, and a well-stocked office (including "a minimum of six different brands of sparkling water"). [sentry.io](https://sentry.io/careers/)
- **Engineering Culture**: High ownership and autonomy; engineers influence product, brand, and culture. The company is known for shipping high-quality code and has a strong open-source ethos. [sentry.io](https://sentry.io/careers/)
- **Diversity & Inclusion**: Committed to equal employment opportunity and providing reasonable accommodations. Explicitly states that software should be accessible, starting with making the industry accessible. [sentry.io](https://sentry.io/careers/)

## Sources
1. [sentry.io](https://sentry.io/about/)
2. [sentry.io](https://sentry.io/careers/)
3. [sentry.io](https://sentry.io/welcome/)
4. [jobs.ashbyhq.com](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sentry)
5. [greatplacetowork.com](https://www.greatplacetowork.com/certified-company/7024898)

## Other roles at Sentry

- [Engineering Manager, Data Platform](https://feeny.ai/job/engineering-manager-data-platform-sentry-san-francisco-x5m6y1bmsy1c) — San Francisco, CA
- [Staff Software Engineer, Platform & Infrastructure](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-software-engineer-platform-infrastructure-sentry-san-francisco-y4wj68djwyvv) — San Francisco, CA
- [Senior Manager, Support Engineering](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-manager-support-engineering-sentry-san-francisco-81psy45dyjrq) — San Francisco, CA
- [Senior Software Engineer, Foundational Storage](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-foundational-storage-sentry-toronto-k926phh2jmme) — Toronto, Canada
- [Senior Software Engineer, Foundational Storage](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-foundational-storage-sentry-san-francisco-6azsxdsgmbst) — San Francisco, CA
- [Senior Software Engineer, Billing Platform](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-billing-platform-sentry-toronto-2kn2qxr50eap) — Toronto, Canada
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