Lead Platform Engineer

Lead Platform Engineer

Cleveland, OH, United States

Job Description

The Lead Platform Engineer role is responsible for setting strategic priorities for the maintenance of platforms within the current technology environment. The role involves sharing leading best practices and providing guidance to maintain the overall integrity of the platform, including operating systems, hardware and software infrastructure that are critical to the company's user populace and application environments. They foster a culture of collaboration with cross-functional teams to ensure that all components of the platform are working efficiently, securely, and resiliently. The Lead Platform Engineer leverages a strategic mindset, offers advice, and drives the development and implementation of security policies to ensure high performance and reliability of the company's infrastructure, including both cloud and on-premises systems, in support of DevOps efforts and general business and IT objectives.

Responsibilities

WHAT THE ROLE WILL DO:

• Set strategic priorities for platform hardware, software, and network requirements in alignment with overall organizational goals
• Share best practices for monitoring system performance, and lead teams responsible for system performance and troubleshooting of issues
• Leverage advanced techniques and methods for optimizing DevOps tools (such as API Gateway, Teraform) to support processes as per organizational needs
• Foster a culture of collaboration among cross-functional teams to ensure new features and services are brought into production
• Leverage a strategic mindset to oversee the execution and maintenance of automated and orchestrated fulfillment mechanisms to optimize delivery of key platform services
• Lead cross-team collaboration and workstreams to ensure smooth operations
• Identify potential security threats, mitigate them proactively and set standards for a strict security compliance
• Drive and oversee the development and implementation of security and resiliency policies, standards, and procedures in line with organizational strategic priorities and latest industry regulations
• Evaluate high-level design documentation, share feedback, and provide recommendations
• Interpret results and present findings from technical research regarding user requests for new/modified systems or severe problem resolution
• Foster strong relationships with vendors to create mutually beneficial opportunities for the organization

Job duties include contact with other employees and access confidential and proprietary information and/or other items of value, and such access may be supervised or unsupervised. The Company therefore has determined that a review of criminal history is necessary to protect the business and its operations and reputation and is necessary to protect the safety of the Company's staff, employees, and business relationships

Must be eighteen years or older

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Must be at least 18 years of age
• Must be legally authorized to work in the country of employment without now or in the future requiring sponsorship for employment visa status (e.g., OPT, CPT, H1B, EB-1, etc.)
• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or a related field. In lieu of a degree, at least 9 years of experience in the role of Platform Engineer or related position
• 6+ years of experience in platform engineering and infrastructure components [with a strong focus on containerization technologies, including Docker, Kubernetes, and Rancher.].
• Expertise in automated interaction with physical infrastructure
• Proven track record in managing and maintaining cloud-based environments such as AWS, GCP, or Azure
• Expertise in monitoring and log management tools such as Nagios, Splunk, and ELK
• Proven track record in developing and implementing backup and disaster recovery strategies
• Expertise in scripting experience in languages such as Python, PowerShell, and Bash
• Expertise in Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and configuration management tools such as Ansible, Chef, and Terraform

Preferred Qualifications:

• Azure Solutions Architect, Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), or AWS Certified DevOps Engineer preferred
• 3+ years of hands-on experience with containerization technologies, including Docker, and Kubernetes and Rancher for orchestration and cluster management
• Proven expertise in maintaining platform-level runtimes, including ingress controllers (e.g., NGINX), TLS certificate lifecycle management (e.g., cert-manager), and secrets management integrations (e.g., HashiCorp Vault)
• Experience deploying and managing observability tools, such as Sysdig for monitoring and CVE scanning, Fluentd for log forwarding, and Elasticsearch for log analysis
• Familiarity with GitOps practices and tools, particularly ArgoCD, to support continuous deployment workflows

Technical Skills

• Programming Languages
• Cloud Technologies & Platforms
• Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD)
• DevOps Methodology
• Software Packaging and Deployment Procedures
• Operating Systems
• Network Operations, Configuration, & Services
• Containerization
• Monitoring and Logging
• Integration Technology