Platform Engineering Lead

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Canada.

📋 Description

• Lead and develop the platform engineering team through one-on-one meetings, career discussions, growth strategies, performance evaluations, and recruitment.

• Take charge of team rituals, which include planning sessions, retrospectives, and incident reviews.

• Foster shared ownership by establishing primary and secondary owners, pairing strategies, shared on-call duties, and documented decisions.

• Mentor senior engineers while cultivating a culture of empowerment, accountability, and collaboration.

• Maintain a prioritized list of tasks and manage requests from Product, Program Management, and clients.

• Collaborate with Product to strategize the platform roadmap, encompassing aspects such as reliability, security, tooling, and customer environments.

• Communicate progress, risks, and expenditures to the VP of Product Development and the leadership team.

• Define the technical direction of the platform and the processes for making, documenting, and reviewing technical decisions.

• Guide architectural decisions through design reviews, code assessments, and hands-on implementation.

• Evaluate significant changes and new customer deployments for cost and risk implications.

• Establish and enhance delivery metrics, including deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, time to restore, and durations for building and testing.

• Set guidelines for continuous integration, preview environments, progressive rollouts, and automated rollback procedures.

• Leverage AI and deterministic automation while ensuring guardrails and tracking KPIs for time savings.

• Oversee AI-assisted development platform tools, access management, licensing, and budget considerations.

• Manage the infrastructure budget across GCP, AWS, and associated tools; forecast, monitor, and clarify variances.

• Create cost visibility across environments, customers, and products.

• Establish cost targets and manage relationships with vendors and licensing partners.

• Ensure platform reliability, including SLOs, on-call responsibilities, deployments, alerts, support requests, incident responses, and blameless reviews.

• Collaborate with the Chief Information Officer and Chief Privacy and Security Officer on SOC 2 controls documented in Drata.

• Manage technical controls related to access, secrets, continuous integration, and audit evidence.

⛳️ Requirements

• 8+ years of experience in DevOps, site reliability, or platform engineering, with a minimum of 3 years in a management role.

• Proven experience in establishing technical direction and priorities for a platform or infrastructure team while managing senior engineers.

• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, Terraform, and a CI system on GCP or AWS, including the ability to review and contribute to related work.

• Direct responsibility for managing a cloud budget, with documented examples of cost reductions achieved and their measurement.

• Experience enhancing developer productivity, supported by measurable metrics.

• Demonstrated history of automating repetitive operational tasks to maximize team efficiency.

• Familiarity with SOC 2 or a similar control framework.

• Comfortable working with health or genomic data, where access protocols are stringent and subject to audits.

• Excellent communication skills, including the ability to explain technical trade-offs and costs to non-technical stakeholders.

• Ability to work effectively across global time zones.

• Experience with Concourse CI is a plus (not mandatory).

• Experience managing multiple environments from a single platform is advantageous (not mandatory).

• Familiarity with using AI and automation to enhance output, including implementing access guardrails for agents (not mandatory).

• Experience in developing cost allocation or showback models, as well as internal developer platforms, is a plus (not mandatory).

• Knowledge of Java services built on Spring Boot, GA4GH standards, or WDL workflow engines is preferred (not mandatory).

• Candidates must be eligible to work in Canada.

• Job offers are contingent upon a successful background check, as permitted by law.

🏝️ Benefits

• Remote-friendly work environment with flexible hours and the option to work on-site at our Toronto office.

• Comprehensive health benefits, including medical, dental, and vision coverage for you and your dependents.

• Three weeks of vacation annually.

• Unlimited sick days available.

• Maternity and parental leave top-up programs offered.

• One-time stipend for remote office setup.

• Support for career development and learning opportunities.

• Opportunity to participate in DNAstack's Employee Stock Option Program.

• Chance to contribute to open science and global data-sharing initiatives.