Principal Platform Engineer

Principal Platform Engineer

Sunflower Bank, N.A. is looking for an energetic, highly motivated individual to fill the position of a full-time Principal Platform Engineer.

This position is under consideration for hybrid.

As a Principal Platform Engineer, you will define and drive the technology vision for Platform Engineering within Sunflower Bank's broader IT modernization strategy. This role connects strategic business outcomes to engineering execution by standardizing, simplifying, and automating the platforms and practices used to deliver secure, resilient, compliant, and scalable banking capabilities.

You will lead the creation and evolution of Sunflower Bank's Internal Developer Platform (IDP) and shared technology services, providing governed self-service, engineering standards, golden paths, automation, observability, and reusable infrastructure capabilities that accelerate delivery, reduce operational risk, and eliminate unnecessary complexity.

Operating as both a technical strategist and hands-on engineering change leader, you will influence technical direction across the enterprise, establish measurable standards, and partner with Architecture, Cybersecurity, Infrastructure, Operations, Data, and Application teams to modernize the technology estate and improve delivery speed, reliability, control effectiveness, and business outcomes.

Technology delivery and operations teams are the platform's customers and partners. Success is measured through adoption, developer and operator experience, automation, service reliability, control effectiveness, cost transparency, reduction in manual work and technical debt, and the consistent delivery of business value.

Responsibilities:

• Define and execute a multi-year Platform Engineering roadmap aligned to Sunflower Bank's business strategy, target-state architecture, risk appetite, merger integration priorities, and IT modernization outcomes.
• Establish and evolve the Internal Developer Platform and shared platform services using a product operating model, with clear service ownership, roadmaps, lifecycle standards, support models, and measurable customer outcomes.
• Define platform capabilities including:
• Developer self-service
• Infrastructure automation
• CI/CD services
• Security guardrails
• Identity integration
• Observability
• Service onboarding
• Runtime platforms
• Promote a platform-first, reuse-before-build mindset across technology teams to reduce tool sprawl, one-off solutions, and long-term support complexity.
• Measure platform success through a balanced scorecard covering adoption, time to deliver, reliability, security and compliance, unit cost, automation, customer experience, technical debt reduction, and operational efficiency.
• Design and lead the implementation of an enterprise Internal Developer Platform.
• Establish secure-by-design engineering golden paths that enable teams to rapidly build, deploy, operate, and retire solutions using approved, supportable, and auditable patterns.
• Build reusable platform capabilities that reduce duplication and improve consistency across engineering teams.
• Create policy-governed self-service experiences that allow authorized teams to provision environments, deploy applications, access approved services, and consume infrastructure safely, consistently, and with traceable approvals.
• Drive platform product management practices, including platform roadmaps, adoption strategies, and customer feedback loops.
• Define engineering reference architectures, platform design standards, and technology lifecycle requirements that guide modernization, integration, and decommissioning decisions.
• Establish reusable patterns for hybrid cloud, infrastructure, application delivery, integration, data, identity, resilience, and security services, while reducing unnecessary variation across the enterprise.
• Serve as a senior technical authority on engineering platforms and enterprise-scale systems.
• Ensure solutions meet defined requirements for scalability, recoverability, resiliency, observability, supportability, security, data protection, regulatory compliance, and total cost of ownership.
• Partner with Enterprise Architecture to evolve target-state technology architecture.
• Establish pragmatic Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices across the organization, including service ownership, reliability engineering, capacity management, problem management, and continuous improvement.
• Define Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and Error Budget frameworks.
• Lead an enterprise observability and operational intelligence strategy that consolidates tooling, improves end-to-end service visibility, and includes:
• Monitoring
• Logging
• Tracing
• Incident management
• Operational analytics
• Drive automation of operational, control, and evidence-collection processes to improve resiliency, accelerate recovery, reduce manual effort, and strengthen audit readiness.
• Provide technical leadership for critical incidents, root-cause remediation, recurring-problem elimination, and systemic platform risks, with clear accountability and transparent executive communication.
• Drive modernization and rationalization of CI/CD capabilities and software delivery pipelines, emphasizing standard services, embedded controls, automated testing, and repeatable release practices.
• Define standards for Infrastructure as Code (IaC), GitOps, platform automation, and release engineering.
• Establish engineering workflows that make the secure, compliant, and supportable path the easiest path, while improving repeatability, evidence quality, and delivery velocity.
• Continuously evaluate emerging technologies and practices that improve engineering effectiveness.
• Eliminate delivery bottlenecks through automation and platform enablement.
• Define, publish, and govern enterprise engineering standards, approved patterns, exception processes, and technology lifecycle expectations, with clear ownership and measurable conformance.
• Establish platform guardrails that balance developer autonomy with security and regulatory requirements.
• Partner closely with Information Security, Enterprise Risk, Compliance, and Internal Audit to translate requirements into automated guardrails, preventive controls, continuous monitoring, and reusable evidence.
• Promote technology consistency and architectural alignment across business domains.
• Influence technology direction without direct authority across engineering, infrastructure, security, architecture, and data teams.
• Serve as a trusted advisor to senior technology leadership.
• Facilitate alignment between strategic technology initiatives and platform capabilities.
• Drive adoption of platform services through transparent roadmaps, documentation, enablement, communities of practice, and a collaborative 'do it with me' partnership model.
• Continuously improve the developer experience across the organization.
• Reduce engineering friction and cognitive load through standardized tooling, automation, self-service, and authoritative documentation that supports a centralized source of truth for operational and engineering artifacts.
• Establish role-based technical training, onboarding standards, engineering enablement programs, and succession pathways that expand internal capability and reduce key-person dependency.
• Create communities of practice to promote engineering excellence and knowledge sharing.
• Mentor engineers and technical leaders across the organization.
• Evaluate and rationalize platform technologies, engineering tools, and strategic vendor solutions based on capability fit, interoperability, resilience, risk, cost, supportability, and long-term architectural alignment.
• Lead technical due diligence activities for engineering-related products and services.
• Ensure vendor capabilities, contracts, roadmaps, and operating models align with the long-term platform strategy, bank requirements, exit considerations, and measurable value realization.
• Perform the job in accordance with applicable industry laws and regulations as well as the policies and procedures established by the company.

Education / Experience Preferred:

Required:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or equivalent experience.
• 10+ years of progressive software engineering, infrastructure engineering, or platform engineering experience.
• 5+ years leading large-scale engineering initiatives or technical programs.
• Demonstrated experience designing, operating, measuring, and continuously improving enterprise platform services used across multiple technology teams.
• Deep understanding of:
• Platform Engineering
• Developer Experience (DevEx)
• DevOps
• Site Reliability Engineering
• Cloud Platforms
• Infrastructure as Code
• CI/CD Automation
• Observability
• Proven ability to influence senior technology and business leaders, build cross-functional alignment, and drive sustained operating-model and organizational change.
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Mut be bondable.

Preferred:

• Financial Services or Banking industry experience, including work in a regulated environment with formal risk, audit, resilience, and change-control expectations.