Lead Platform Engineer

Description

The company has served agriculture, energy and weather-driven industries for decades, helping operational leaders make faster, better-informed decisions from complex data.

Its internal platform packages cloud infrastructure into higher-level capabilities so engineers, solutions teams and customers can build data products, applications and AI tools without managing that infrastructure themselves.

The company has more than 1,200 employees worldwide, a foundation of financial strength and profitability, and is expanding into new global markets.

This leadership role covers core platform components: developer-facing APIs, SDKs, CLIs, the module framework other teams use, and managed cloud services.

Much of the platform is still greenfield, so you will design foundational systems while evolving existing ones, with a clear path to Staff or Principal technical leadership.

Responsibilities

• Own complex platform components end to end, from developer interfaces through the cross-account cloud infrastructure behind them.
• Lead the design, build, operation and evolution of complex platform capabilities, weighing architectural options and tradeoffs.
• Define engineering problems and propose scalable, secure and maintainable solutions.
• Work with the Enterprise Architecture team on foundational platform capabilities.
• Lead greenfield platform work while maintaining existing systems.
• Build reusable abstractions so other teams can ship data products, applications and AI solutions without touching cloud infrastructure.
• Build and maintain developer-facing APIs, SDKs, CLIs, module frameworks and managed services.
• Set architectural patterns that support scalability, reliability, security and developer productivity.
• Design secure distributed systems that run reliably across isolated AWS accounts and multi-tenant environments.
• Build secure cross-account communication and multi-tenant isolation.
• Automate provisioning and lifecycle management for cloud platform capabilities.
• Build asynchronous, event-driven processing with reliable messaging, retries, backoff and idempotent operations.
• Build service discovery, reconciliation and health monitoring.
• Apply at-least-once delivery, eventual consistency, failure-mode analysis and resilient service interactions.
• Anticipate failures such as communication breakdowns, outages and isolation breaches, and add safeguards.
• Use AWS identity and access management, serverless compute, API services, managed data stores, event services and security primitives.
• Build and maintain infrastructure with Terraform and standard infrastructure-as-code practices.
• Own security-critical components and the communication paths between them.
• Design and harden service-to-service authentication, including mutual TLS (mTLS).
• Implement cryptographic signing, signature verification and replay protection.
• Design identity and access management patterns across accounts and services, applying least privilege and multi-tenant isolation.
• Analyse security failure modes and potential isolation breaches, and build security into architecture, interfaces, infrastructure and operations.
• Lead the development of SDKs, APIs, CLIs and the shared module framework.
• Create reusable capabilities so teams focus on business logic while the platform handles common technical needs.
• Define interface contracts, data contracts and consistent integration patterns.
• Implement framework features for authentication, authenticated dispatch, validation, metrics, retries and reconciliation.
• Turn repeated engineering requirements into standard platform components.
• Design developer interfaces that stay consistent, maintainable and easy to integrate.
• Support schema-driven interface definitions and validation.
• Set the team's technical direction and engineering standards, and write and review technical designs and architecture decision records (ADRs).
• Define standards for interfaces, data contracts, testing, infrastructure as code and observability.
• Mentor mid-level and earlier-career engineers through feedback, pairing and hands-on help.
• Lead architecture discussions, design reviews and code reviews.
• Improve engineering processes, development standards and platform architecture over time.
• Own the reliability and production health of assigned components, including SLOs.
• Instrument services with metrics, logging, tracing and observability.
• Take part in on-call rotations and investigate production incidents across distributed and cross-account systems.
• Reduce recurring incidents and operational toil.
• Keep build, test and release discipline through CI, automated testing, trunk-based development and immutable, pinned releases.
• Use AI coding assistants and agentic development tools to speed up development and problem-solving.
• Build AI-augmented modular platform components, integrating LLMs, AI agents and managed AI services.
• Evaluate AI technologies that could extend the platform's functionality.

Requirements

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience building and running production distributed systems.
• A record of independently owning complex software systems through their full lifecycle.
• Able to lead technical initiatives, set engineering direction and make sound architecture decisions.
• Experience mentoring engineers through design guidance, code reviews and collaborative development.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent professional experience.
• Deep expertise in AWS cloud-native architecture: identity and access management, serverless compute, API layers, managed data stores, event-driven services and cloud security primitives.
• Solid grasp of distributed-systems fundamentals: idempotency, at-least-once delivery, eventual consistency, retries, backoff and rigorous failure-mode analysis.
• Experience designing, building and operating secure, reliable and scalable distributed applications.
• Hands-on experience with Terraform and infrastructure as code.
• Strong discipline in building, testing and deploying software, including continuous integration and automated testing.
• Solid applied security engineering experience with authenticated service-to-service communication, including mTLS.
• Experience with cryptographic signing and verification, identity management, replay protection and least-privilege design.
• Able to reason through complex security requirements, distributed failure scenarios and multi-tenant isolation risks.
• Proficient in TypeScript/Node.js, or able to become productive with them quickly.
• Academic or professional exposure to front-end technologies such as React, Angular or Vue.
• Academic or professional exposure to back-end technologies such as Node.js or Python.
• Academic or professional experience with SQL and databases such as PostgreSQL, DynamoDB or equivalent.
• Expert-level experience building RESTful APIs with Node.js.
• Expert-level experience consuming both REST and GraphQL APIs.
• Journeyman-level knowledge of source control and versioning with Git.
• Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development tools, including coding assistants and agentic tooling.
• Hands-on experience designing AI-augmented platform capabilities, including LLM and AI-agent integrations and managed AI services.
• Able to build AI-enabled functionality into modular, reusable platform components.
• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to evaluate complex architectural options.
• Able to guide complex engineering work from design through production operation.
• Able to communicate technical direction, give constructive engineering feedback and mentor others.
• Committed to building secure, reliable, observable and reusable solutions.
• Would stand out: built multi-tenant SaaS platforms, cross-account control planes, or internal developer platforms and SDKs.
• Would stand out: designed APIs and SDKs used by other engineers, with attention to developer ergonomics, consistency and usability.
• Would stand out: familiar with observability technologies such as OpenTelemetry.
• Would stand out: experience with schema-driven interface validation.
• Would stand out: awareness of multi-cloud architectures and technologies.
• Would stand out: built platform components with TypeScript/Node.js, Python, containers, Terraform and modern AWS cloud-native services.
• Would stand out: built secure cross-account infrastructure and developer-facing abstractions in greenfield platforms.
• Would stand out: familiar with module frameworks that handle authenticated dispatch, signing, validation, metrics and reconciliation.
• Would stand out: applied trunk-based development, ADR-driven design, immutable or pinned releases, least-privilege access and schema-validated interfaces.
• Would stand out: background in operational or data-intensive industries such as energy, logistics, weather or agriculture.

Conditions

The role is hybrid, and remote work is possible depending on the position.

Flexible working hours.

The targeted base pay range is $132,000 to $175,000, and it may change over time.

Actual base pay depends on prior experience, training and education, transferable skills, business needs, internal equity and applicable laws.

The company pays for performance, so pay can increase over time with performance.

The role may also be eligible for market-competitive variable pay and benefits.

The company is an equal opportunity employer and welcomes applicants of all backgrounds, including minorities, women, veterans and people with disabilities.

Benefits

• Competitive salary.
• Unlimited paid time off.
• Competitive medical, dental and vision insurance plans.
• 6% 401(k) matching.
• Unlimited access to 13k+ courses on a learning platform for career development.
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP).