Platform Engineering Lead

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Platform Engineering Lead based in Canada.
The Platform Engineering Lead will shape the strategy, technical direction, and day-to-day execution of a platform engineering function supporting complex, cloud-based products. This player-coach role combines people leadership with hands-on technical contribution across cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, automation, CI/CD, security, and reliability. You will guide a team of engineers, establish clear priorities, and build a scalable platform roadmap in partnership with Product. You will also oversee infrastructure costs, improve developer productivity, and strengthen operational practices through measurable outcomes. Working across engineering, product, security, and leadership teams, you will help create a reliable and efficient environment for delivering software. Your work will support biomedical data sharing and research initiatives with meaningful applications in precision medicine.

Accountabilities

Lead and develop the team: Manage engineers through regular one-to-ones, career development plans, performance reviews, and hiring. Coach senior engineers and foster accountability, collaboration, and shared ownership.

Establish team priorities: Maintain a transparent, ranked backlog, assess requests from Product, Program Management, and customers, and determine what should be prioritized, deferred, or stopped.

Own the platform roadmap: Partner with Product to plan infrastructure, reliability, security, tooling, and customer-environment improvements alongside product development.

Guide technical direction: Define platform architecture and technical decision-making practices, lead design and code reviews, contribute to implementation, and evaluate major technical changes and deployments.

Improve engineering productivity: Define and monitor delivery metrics, including deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, recovery time, and build and test duration. Improve CI/CD pipelines, preview environments, deployment safety, and automated rollback.

Leverage AI and automation: Introduce AI-assisted development tools and deterministic automation, establish appropriate access guardrails, and track productivity gains. Oversee related tooling, licensing, access, and budget.

Manage cloud costs: Own infrastructure budgets across GCP, AWS, and related tools; forecast spending, monitor variances, establish cost targets, and improve cost visibility across customers, environments, and products.

Ensure reliability and security: Define service level objectives, oversee on-call practices, incident response, alerts, and blameless reviews. Partner with privacy and security leadership on SOC 2 controls, including access management, secrets, CI, and audit evidence.

Communicate progress and risks: Report on roadmap delivery, infrastructure spending, operational risks, and investment needs to senior leadership.

Requirements:

8+ years of experience in DevOps, site reliability engineering, or platform engineering, including at least 3 years managing engineers.

Demonstrated experience setting technical direction and priorities for a platform or infrastructure team and managing senior engineers.

Production experience with Kubernetes, Terraform, and CI systems on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Strong hands-on technical skills, including the ability to review infrastructure plans, assess architecture proposals, review code, and contribute to implementation.

Direct accountability for a cloud infrastructure budget, with demonstrable examples of cost reductions and measurable results.

Experience improving developer productivity through delivery metrics, process improvements, and engineering tooling.

A track record of automating repetitive operational tasks and increasing the effectiveness of small engineering teams.

Familiarity with SOC 2 or comparable security and compliance frameworks, and the ability to work with sensitive health or genomic data subject to strict access controls and auditing.

Strong communication skills, including the ability to explain technical decisions, trade-offs, costs, and risks to non-technical stakeholders.

Comfortable collaborating across teams and global time zones.

Nice to have: Concourse CI experience; experience managing multiple environments through a shared platform; AI-assisted development and automation expertise; experience with cost allocation or showback models or internal developer platforms; familiarity with Java and Spring Boot, GA4GH standards, or WDL workflow engines.

Benefits:

Annual salary range of CAD-equivalent? The posting specifies $165,000–$185,000; the currency is not explicitly stated in the supplied text.

Remote-friendly work arrangement, with flexible hours and the option to work from the Toronto office.

Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and their dependents.

Three weeks of vacation.

Unlimited sick days.

Maternity and parental leave top-up programs.

One-time remote office setup stipend.

Career development and learning support.

Opportunity to participate in an employee stock option program.

Opportunity to contribute to open science and global biomedical data-sharing initiatives.