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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Lead Platform Engineer

💰 $160,000 - $220,000

EngineeringPlatform EngineeringDevOpsSRECloud Infrastructure

🎯 Role Definition

Are you a passionate technologist with a vision for building world-class developer experiences? This role requires a highly skilled and motivated Lead Platform Engineer to join our dynamic team and take ownership of our core infrastructure. In this pivotal role, you will be both a technical expert and a team mentor, responsible for architecting, implementing, and evolving our cloud platform. You will lead the charge in enhancing system reliability, scalability, and security, while empowering our software engineering teams to ship code faster and more safely. If you thrive on solving complex distributed systems problems and want to make a significant impact on our engineering culture, this is the opportunity for you.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Platform Engineer
  • Senior DevOps Engineer
  • Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

Advancement To:

  • Principal Platform Engineer
  • Staff Engineer
  • Engineering Manager, Platform

Lateral Moves:

  • Lead Security Engineer
  • Solutions Architect

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Architect and Implement Cloud Infrastructure: Lead the design, development, and maintenance of our scalable, highly available, and fault-tolerant cloud infrastructure on AWS, GCP, or Azure.
  • Drive Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Excellence: Champion and enforce IaC best practices using tools like Terraform, Pulumi, or CloudFormation to manage all aspects of the platform declaratively.
  • Own Container Orchestration: Act as the subject matter expert for our Kubernetes ecosystem, managing cluster lifecycle, networking, security, and workload scheduling to ensure optimal performance and resource utilization.
  • Lead CI/CD Strategy and Tooling: Design, implement, and continuously improve our CI/CD pipelines to enable rapid, reliable, and secure software delivery for all engineering teams.
  • Develop Internal Developer Platform (IDP): Spearhead the creation and evolution of an internal developer platform to abstract infrastructure complexity and provide engineers with self-service capabilities for deployment, monitoring, and testing.
  • Mentor and Guide the Team: Provide technical leadership, mentorship, and coaching to a team of platform engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence, collaboration, and continuous learning.
  • Enhance System Observability: Evolve our observability stack (metrics, logging, tracing) using tools like Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, and Datadog to provide deep insights into system health and performance.
  • Define and Monitor Service Level Objectives (SLOs): Work with engineering teams to define, measure, and report on SLOs and error budgets, driving a data-informed approach to reliability.
  • Lead Incident Management and Post-mortems: Guide the team during critical production incidents, and lead blameless post-mortem processes to identify root causes and implement preventative measures.
  • Automate Operational Toil: Identify and automate manual, repetitive operational tasks to improve team efficiency, reduce human error, and allow engineers to focus on high-value work.
  • Manage Cloud Costs and Optimization: Implement strategies and tooling for monitoring, analyzing, and optimizing cloud expenditure, ensuring we operate in a cost-effective manner without compromising performance.
  • Enforce Platform Security and Compliance: Partner with the security team to integrate security best practices, vulnerability scanning, and compliance controls directly into the platform and CI/CD pipelines.
  • Evaluate and Integrate New Technologies: Proactively research, prototype, and evaluate emerging technologies and tools to enhance platform capabilities and maintain our competitive edge.
  • Create and Maintain Technical Roadmaps: Develop and manage the technical roadmap for the platform team, ensuring alignment with product goals and broader engineering initiatives.
  • Improve Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity: Design, test, and refine disaster recovery plans and procedures to ensure the resilience of our platform against major failures.
  • Facilitate Cross-Functional Collaboration: Act as a primary technical liaison between the platform team and other engineering, product, and data science teams to ensure their infrastructure needs are met.
  • Develop and Standardize Platform APIs: Design and build standardized APIs and interfaces for the platform, enabling programmatic interaction and integration with other systems.
  • Manage Service Mesh and Network Policies: Oversee the implementation and management of a service mesh like Istio or Linkerd to control traffic, enhance security, and improve observability for microservices.
  • Lead Large-Scale Migration Projects: Plan and execute complex technical migrations, such as moving from a monolithic to a microservices architecture or upgrading major infrastructure components with minimal downtime.
  • Document Architecture and Processes: Create and maintain comprehensive documentation for platform architecture, operational procedures, runbooks, and best practices to enable knowledge sharing and onboarding.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Cloud Platforms: Expert-level proficiency with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure), including core services like EC2/GCE, S3/GCS, VPC, and IAM.
  • Containerization & Orchestration: Deep, hands-on experience with Docker and Kubernetes, including cluster administration, networking (CNI), and security.
  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Mastery of Terraform for provisioning and managing cloud resources in a modular and reusable way.
  • CI/CD Systems: Extensive experience designing and managing complex CI/CD pipelines using tools like GitLab CI, Jenkins, CircleCI, or GitHub Actions.
  • Observability Stack: Strong skills in implementing and managing monitoring and logging tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Thanos, Loki, ELK Stack, Datadog).
  • Scripting and Automation: Proficiency in at least one programming language for automation and tooling, such as Go, Python, or Bash.
  • Networking: Solid understanding of cloud networking concepts, including VPCs, subnets, load balancing, DNS, and service mesh technologies (e.g., Istio).
  • Database Management: Experience with managing both SQL and NoSQL databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB) in a cloud environment.
  • Security Best Practices: Knowledge of infrastructure security principles, including identity and access management, vulnerability management, and network security.
  • Distributed Systems: Strong architectural understanding of distributed systems, microservices, and event-driven architectures.

Soft Skills

  • Technical Leadership & Mentorship: Proven ability to guide and mentor a team, leading by example and elevating the skills of others.
  • Strategic Thinking: Ability to see the big picture, anticipate future technical needs, and create long-term roadmaps.
  • Communication: Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
  • Collaboration: A strong, collaborative mindset with a track record of working effectively across multiple engineering teams.
  • Problem-Solving: Advanced analytical and troubleshooting skills, with a talent for debugging complex issues in distributed systems.
  • Pragmatism: Ability to balance technical purity with business needs to deliver value incrementally and effectively.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in a technical field or equivalent practical experience in building and managing software systems.

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Information Technology
  • Software Engineering

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 8+ years of experience in DevOps, SRE, or Platform Engineering, with at least 2 years in a technical leadership or senior capacity.

Preferred:

  • Experience building an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) from the ground up.
  • Proven track record of leading major infrastructure projects with significant business impact.
  • Active participation in the open-source community is a plus.
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