Lead Platform Engineer

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Join Updater’s Platform Engineering team as a Lead Platform Engineer who combines technical excellence and exceptional collaboration skills to deliver impact. You will drive vital initiatives including deployment velocity, observability, system reliability, and developer experience by partnering closely with product pods, project managers, and other stakeholders across the business to understand their workflows and pain points. You'll build the infrastructure and tooling that lets engineers ship faster and sleep better—think GitOps workflows, Kubernetes configuration and optimization, comprehensive Datadog observability coverage, and the kind of automation that makes deployments uneventful. This is platform engineering done right: pragmatic, impactful, and centered on enabling the broader engineering organization.

Responsibilities

• Embody a culture of continuous improvement and shared ownership backed by clear documentation, runbooks, and other shift left contributions
• Treat platform capabilities as products—gather requirements from development pods, prioritize based on impact, iterate based on feedback, and measure adoption and satisfaction
• Build strong, collaborative relationships evidenced by proactive engagement from product teams
• Continually improve system reliability and observability coverage
• Reduce tooling and config complexity so that engineers spend less time fighting tools and more time building features
• Optimize Infrastructure costs without compromising reliability
• Reduce time-to-production for new features and services
• Ensure reliable, repeatable, and better standardized deployments with minimal manual intervention

Must-Have Skills and Experience

Soft Skills

• Excellent cross-functional collaboration abilities beyond traditional IT/ops boundaries—you regularly engage with functions across the business to understand their needs, gather feedback, and champion DevEx improvements. You're as comfortable explaining infrastructure tradeoffs in a product planning meeting as you are debugging a Kubernetes cluster
• Ability to communicate effectively to both technical and non-technical audiences alike, and leverages visuals, data, and concise documentation to build shared understanding
• Deep empathy for DevEx—you genuinely understand engineer pain points, involve users in design decisions, and measure success by how much you improve their daily work
• Positive, team-oriented mindset that treats every day as an opportunity to improve and inspire others through your can-do attitude

Technical

• Previous experience on a platform engineering team where you led complex infrastructure or tooling migration efforts and built useful dev-focused tools that required deep understanding of product development workflows, sprint planning, and release cycles across multiple pods
• Deep practical experience architecting and implementing solutions in AWS, backed by strong command of cloud design patterns and technologies
• Deep expertise in Kubernetes containerized workloads and orchestration
• Strong command of observability tools like DataDog or Prometheus
• Proficiency in Terraform IaC 
• Experience in building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines and associated best practices
• Solid experience with Git via Gitlab, Github, or Bitbucket.
• Familiarity with GitOps tooling like Spacelift or Flux
• Strong project management skills that balance interrupt-driven and roadmap work
• Eagerness to learn new and evolving technologies in the Platform Engineering ecosystem

Bonus Points For

• Frontend or backend development skills
• Previous experience as project lead or team lead
• Experience working embedded with or closely partnering with product squads/pods in an agile environment
• Use of AI tooling to help improve efficiency in your daily work
• Previous experience tuning SQL and caching technologies

Compensation

This posting is anticipated to remain open until 2/28/2026 . The new hire salary range for this position is $180,000 - $215,000 annually. Factors which may affect the starting pay within this range include skills, experience, and other qualifications aligned with Updater's internal leveling guidelines.