IT Applications Engineer VI, Container Platform Engineering Lead

Tech Summary
This principal-level individual contributor serves within Kaiser Permanente's Container Platform and Adoption Services organization and provides technical leadership for the enterprise container platform service spanning on-premises and public-cloud environments. The department's mission is to deliver a consistent, secure, resilient, and supportable platform experience that enables application modernization and scalable adoption across the organization.

The Container Platform Engineering Lead sets the technical direction for platform engineering and establishes the reusable standards, architectural guardrails, automation approaches, and engineering practices needed to operate the service as one enterprise capability. The position leads complex designs for shared platforms, dedicated environments, application onboarding, developer tooling, data services, enterprise middleware, and other specialized workloads while remaining actively engaged in engineering and implementation.

The role works across application delivery, cloud and infrastructure engineering, cybersecurity, networking, observability, reliability engineering, enterprise architecture, and external service providers to translate strategy and risk requirements into practical platform outcomes. Through design leadership, technical governance, mentoring, and partnership with the Operations Lead, this position reduces fragmented solutions, improves engineering quality and platform reliability, and creates the repeatable capabilities required to modernize mission-critical healthcare applications at enterprise scale.

This principal-level individual contributor serves within Kaiser Permanente's Container Platform and Adoption Services organization and provides technical leadership for the enterprise container platform service spanning on-premises and public-cloud environments. The department's mission is to deliver a consistent, secure, resilient, and supportable platform experience that enables application modernization and scalable adoption across the organization.

The Container Platform Engineering Lead sets the technical direction for platform engineering and establishes the reusable standards, architectural guardrails, automation approaches, and engineering practices needed to operate the service as one enterprise capability. The position leads complex designs for shared platforms, dedicated environments, application onboarding, developer tooling, data services, enterprise middleware, and other specialized workloads while remaining actively engaged in engineering and implementation.

The role works across application delivery, cloud and infrastructure engineering, cybersecurity, networking, observability, reliability engineering, enterprise architecture, and external service providers to translate strategy and risk requirements into practical platform outcomes. Through design leadership, technical governance, mentoring, and partnership with the Operations Lead, this position reduces fragmented solutions, improves engineering quality and platform reliability, and creates the repeatable capabilities required to modernize mission-critical healthcare applications at enterprise scale.

Job Summary:
This senior level employee is primarily responsible for influencing and leveraging the technical direction of integrated business and/or enterprise application solutions and for serving as an expert for technical teams. This employee is accountable for ensuring software solutions are managed with full adherence to industry best practices.

Essential Responsibilities:

• Drives the execution of multiple work streams by identifying customer and operational needs; developing and updating new procedures and policies; gaining cross-functional support for objectives and priorities; translating business strategy into actionable business requirements; obtaining and distributing resources; setting standards and measuring progress; removing obstacles that impact performance; guiding performance and developing contingency plans accordingly; solving highly complex issues; and influencing the completion of project tasks by others.
• Practices self-leadership and promotes learning in others by soliciting and acting on performance feedback; building collaborative, cross-functional relationships; communicating information and providing advice to drive projects forward; adapting to competing demands and new responsibilities; providing feedback to others, including upward feedback to leadership; influencing, mentoring, and coaching team members; fostering open dialogue amongst team members; evaluating and responding to the strengths and weaknesses of self and unit members; and adapting to and learning from change, difficulties, and feedback.
• Provides insight into recommendations for complex technical solutions that meet design and functional needs.
• Serves as an expert for innovative technical solutions that meet design and functional needs.
• Collaborates with architects and/or software consultants to ensure functional specifications are converted into flexible, scalable, and maintainable solution designs.
• Provides technical expertise for the development, configuration, or modification of integrated business and/or enterprise application solutions within various computing environments by providing insight, guidance, and an escalation point for the design and coding of component-based applications.
• Translates business requirements and functional specifications into physical program designs, code modules, stable application systems, and software solutions by partnering with Business Analysts and other team members to understand business needs and functional specifications.
• Leverages networks to drive collaboration between technical teams, architects, and/or software consultants, and ensure functional specifications are converted into flexible, scalable, and maintainable solution designs.
• Builds and maintains trusting relationships with internal customers, third party vendors, and senior management to ensure the alignment, buy-in, and support of diverse project stakeholders.
• Oversees the review and implementation of recommendations of technical solutions across multiple functions.
• Takes accountability for ensuring specific interfaces, methods, parameters, procedures, and functions support technical solutions and are aligned with architectural designs.
• Derives an overall strategy of data management, within an established Information Architecture, that supports the business model. Identifies information structures and detail to enable the development and secure operation of new information services. Takes overall responsibility for planning effective information storage, sharing, and publishing within the organization.
• Sets strategies for effective use of database technology taking account of the complex interrelations between hardware/software. Provides specialist expertise in the development, use, or operation of database management system tools and facilities. Provides expert knowledge in the selection, provision, and use of database architectures, software, and facilities, typically taking responsibility for a team of technical staff.
• Facilitates and serves as a technical expert for project teams throughout the release schedule of business and enterprise software solutions.
• Provides expertise and guidance to team members for systems incident responses for complex issues.
• Fosters and leverages partnerships with IT teams and vendors to ensure written code adheres to company architectural standards, design patterns, and technical specification.
• Maintains and enhances technical expertise and knowledge of industry trends by attending participating conferences, and developing a network with other IT industry experts.
• Leads consultation efforts to help ensure new and existing software solutions are developed with insight into industry best practices, strategies, and architectures.
• Provides expert technical advice and recommendations to others within the organization on matters related to software engineering, including market trends, and new programs and applications.
• Reviews and verifies resource estimates for complex technical design, coding, and testing efforts.
• Identifies specific interfaces, methods, parameters, procedures, and functions, as required, to support technical solutions, serving as an escalation point for complex or unresolved issues related to requirements translation.
• As part of the IT Engineering job family, this position is responsible for leveraging DEVOPS, and both Waterfall and Agile practices, to design, develop, and deliver resilient, secure, multi-channel, high-volume, high-transaction, on/off-premise, cloud-based solutions.

Minimum Qualifications:

• Minimum six (6) years experience working on project(s) involving the implementation of solutions applying development life cycles (e.g., SDLC).
• Minimum four (4) years in a technical leadership role with or without direct reports.
• Bachelors degree in Computer Science, CIS, or related field and Minimum ten (10) years experience in software development or a related field. Additional equivalent work experience may be substituted for the degree requirement.