We are looking for a Senior Platform Engineer / Platform Architect with 10–15 years of experience, including at least 2 years in a Solution Architect, Platform Engineer, or Principal Engineer role.
This role reports directly to the VP of Engineering and acts as a key technical partner in shaping the platform and architectural strategy across the organization.
You will spend roughly 30% of your time hands-on (prototyping, reference implementations, critical fixes) and 70% on architecture, cross-team technical support, and platform direction. The focus is on enabling teams: providing technical guidance, designing cross-team components, and supporting the DevOps team when needed, not running day-to-day DevOps operations.
Key Responsibilities
1. Architecture & Technical Leadership
- Define and evolve the overall platform and system architecture across multiple teams.
- Review and challenge technical designs, RFCs, and proposals from product and platform squads.
- Establish and maintain engineering standards and best practices (service design, reliability, observability, security, deployment patterns).
- Work closely with the VP of Engineering to translate business and product goals into a clear platform roadmap, and ensure alignment on architecture decisions.
- Act as a trusted technical advisor to engineering managers and tech leads on scalability, reliability, and cost.
2. Cross-Team Platform Components
- Identify common technical needs across teams and lead the design of shared platform services and components (e.g., authentication, logging, messaging, file storage, internal SDKs, shared libraries).
- Own the technical direction and lifecycle of these shared components, ensuring they are robust, well-documented, and widely adopted.
- Coordinate with multiple squads to roll out platform changes safely, with clear communication and migration paths.
3. Technical Support Across Teams
- Provide deep technical support to teams on:
- Complex incidents and production issues
- Performance and scalability challenges
- System migrations, refactors, and critical projects
- Help teams unblock problems by guiding them to good solutions, instead of doing all the implementation yourself.
- Support engineering leaders in making trade-offs between speed, quality, and complexity.
4. DevOps & Infrastructure Support (Advisory / On-Demand)
- Collaborate with DevOps / Platform / SRE teams on the design of infrastructure, CI/CD, and operational tooling.
- Review infrastructure as code, deployment models, and reliability strategies for key systems.
- Join high-severity incidents and post-mortems when needed, providing architectural guidance and long-term improvements.
- Be hands-on with DevOps work only when necessary (e.g., critical issues, complex migrations, important POCs), not as a daily operational responsibility.
5. Hands-On Engineering (~30% of Time)
- Implement critical or complex parts of shared systems and reference implementations that set standards for others to follow.
- Build proofs of concept (POCs) to validate new technologies, patterns, or architectural approaches.
- Perform high-impact code reviews on core components and platform-related changes.
6. Stakeholder Collaboration
- Partner with the VP of Engineering on long-term technology decisions, platform investments, and risk management.
- Collaborate with engineering managers, product managers, and DevOps to ensure platform initiatives are understood, prioritized, and executed effectively.
- Communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders about architecture, impact, and trade-offs.
Required Qualifications
- 10–15 years of experience in software engineering, platform engineering, or infrastructure.
- Minimum 2 years in a Solution Architect, Principal Engineer, or Platform Engineer leadership role.
- Proven experience designing and evolving complex distributed systems across multiple teams.
- Strong experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
- Solid understanding of:
- APIs and microservices architectures
- Distributed systems fundamentals (scalability, resilience, consistency)
- Security, observability, and reliability principles
- Familiarity with DevOps practices and tooling (CI/CD, containers, IaC, monitoring), even if not used hands-on every day.
- Strong programming or scripting skills in at least one language (e.g., Python, Go, Java, C#, etc.).
- Excellent communication, documentation, and stakeholder management skills.
- Experience working in multi-team / multi-tribe environments with complex dependencies.
Nice to Have
- Experience in a central platform / architecture function serving multiple product teams.
- Background with high-scale, high-availability systems.
- Practical exposure to:
- Kubernetes or other orchestration platforms
- Service meshes, API gateways, and edge/CDN configurations
- Cloud cost optimization and governance
- Prior responsibility for technical strategy or platform roadmaps at department or company level.
