Lead Platform Engineer

Requirements and responsibilities

Readable role content extracted into sections for faster review.

People leadership & team development

Manage a team of engineers with full accountability for their performance, growth, and wellbeing
Own 1:1s, performance reviews, and career development conversations — providing direct, constructive feedback that helps engineers grow
Build a team culture that is organized, reliable, and focused on impact
Mentor engineers through code reviews, pairing, and delivery coaching
Partner with the VP on people concerns that require escalation; help shape the team's working norms and resolve friction before it compounds

Technical execution

Be a strong technical contributor: carry significant engineering weight alongside the team and actively deliver on high-impact work
Own day-to-day technical decisions within the team's scope
Translate architectural direction into sprint-level tasks the team can act on
Build and evolve CI/CD pipelines and delivery automation: ensuring deployment safety, consistency, and velocity
Improve observability and operational readiness across metrics, logging, distributed tracing, and alerting — including actionable dashboards and SLO-based alerting
Design and implement automation and self-service workflows using infrastructure-as-code, APIs, and developer platforms to reduce developer friction
Implement secure delivery practices with policy-driven pipeline controls
Contribute to infrastructure in Terraform, working within established architectural patterns and standards
Support and improve secrets management patterns across runtime and CI/CD workflows
Champion AI-assisted development practices across the team — prompt engineering workflows, AI-powered code review, and tooling integrations as first-class parts of the engineering workflow

Operational readiness

Own incident response coordination: drive the process, communicate status, and ensure issues reach the right people
Participate in the on-call rotation and help drive improvements that reduce incidents and alert noise over time
Build and maintain operational runbooks, escalation paths, and documentation for team-owned systems
Drive production readiness as a continuous standard, not a one-time checklist

People management & team development

Manage a team of engineers: this is a formal people manager role with full accountability for the team's performance and growth
Own performance management: regular 1:1s, performance reviews, and direct, constructive feedback
Own career development: growth planning, identifying opportunities, and building engineer capability over time
Mentor engineers through code reviews, pairing, and delivery coaching
Build a team culture that is organized, reliable, and focused on impact
Manage team working norms, address blockers, and partner with the VP on people concerns that require escalation

About you

People leadership experience: Demonstrated history as a formal people manager or tech lead with direct reports — including performance management, career development conversations, and building team capability over time. This is not a senior IC role.
Delivery ownership experience: You have owned timelines, driven sprint execution, and been directly accountable for what a team ships. You know how to run a team's operating rhythm, not just contribute to it.
7+ years of hands-on experience in cloud infrastructure/platform engineering with demonstrated scope growth and increasing leadership responsibility over that time
Strong hands-on experience with Terraform in production (modules, patterns, environment strategy, state management)
Strong hands-on experience operating Kubernetes in production
Strong AWS fundamentals: practical experience with compute, networking, IAM, and production operations
Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines
Strong observability fundamentals including metrics, logging, distributed tracing, SLO/SLI design, and alerting strategy
Experience building automation using Bash and at least one general-purpose language (Python or Go)
Strong troubleshooting skills: you drive root cause analysis and implement long-term fixes, not workarounds
Hands-on experience using AI coding tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude) as a productivity multiplier in production engineering work
Comfort partnering with senior technical peers and sound judgment on when to consult vs. decide independently

Preferred qualifications

Experience with Istio or other service mesh technologies
Experience operating relational databases in AWS (RDS PostgreSQL/Aurora/MS SQL)
Experience with AWS Lambda or serverless architectures
Experience improving reliability for distributed systems at scale
Prior experience as a technical anchor or team lead in a platform or infrastructure context
Experience building or operating infrastructure that supports AI/ML workloads (compute, storage, serving patterns) in AWS