Senior Platform Engineer

Role Overview The Gates Foundation is seeking a Senior Platform Engineer to design and scale a modern data and AI platform that accelerates impact across global health, development, education, gender equality and humanitarian initiatives. This role will lead the development of a secure, governed and scalable platform built on Azure, Databricks and Snowflake, enabling advanced analytics and responsible generative AI solutions using OpenAI and Claude. The engineer will also unlock insights from structured and unstructured data and make them accessible through API‑driven data services and intelligent search using Azure AI Search. Key Responsibilities Lead the architecture and development of a cloud‑native Data and AI platform on Azure, Databricks Lakehouse and Snowflake. Design and implement an API‑first data platform to enable secure, governed data sharing across teams, partners and global stakeholders. Operationalize GenAI solutions for knowledge discovery and decision support, including Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures. Integrate with OpenAI and Claude APIs and build semantic and hybrid search using Azure AI Search. Create design patterns for document ingestion, parsing, OCR, metadata extraction and enrichment. Design and implement embedding and vector search strategies for unstructured data. Lead the implementation of data governance and stewardship practices using Collibra, including data cataloging, lineage, metadata management, data quality frameworks and stewardship workflows. Align with global privacy, security and compliance standards, establishing secure data access patterns (RBAC/ABAC) and protecting sensitive data (PHI/PII scanning). Build reusable platform services, APIs and tools that enable self‑service analytics and AI development. Implement observability, monitoring and evaluation frameworks for data pipelines and AI/LLM systems. Optimize platform performance, scalability and cost efficiency via FinOps dashboards. Develop a lightweight application for search and discovery, cataloging and onboarding new datasets. Experience & Qualifications Bachelor’s or master’s in computer science or related field or equivalent experience. 12+ years’ experience in platform engineering and/or software engineering with a focus on advanced analytics, AI/ML infrastructure, data security and automation. Manage and drive improvements of a lightweight custom application (Data Portal) for self‑service data cataloging, search and discovery. Strong programming skills in Python, C#/.Net and SQL. Hands‑on experience with Azure (Data Lake, Azure ML, Event Hubs, etc.), IaC automation using Terraform, Databricks (Lakeflow, Spark, Delta Lake, workflows, Unity Catalog), Snowflake (Iceberg, Horizon catalog, Cortex AI, secure data sharing). Experience designing and building API‑driven data platforms (REST/GraphQL, microservices). Experience working with unstructured data processing and building data pipelines with Databricks and DBT Cloud and orchestration. Familiarity with Docker, Kubernetes and distributed systems. Additional qualifications: strong understanding of RAG architectures, embeddings and vector databases, document chunking, indexing and retrieval strategies. Previous experience with Salesforce is a plus. Experience with document processing/NLP pipelines (OCR, entity extraction, classification). Experience with Collibra and Data Governance. Benefits The Foundation offers an exceptional benefits package, including comprehensive medical, dental and vision coverage with no premiums, generous paid time off, paid family leave, foundation‑paid retirement contribution, regional holidays and opportunities to engage in employee communities. Salary for this role is $157,400 to $236,000 USD; the range for Seattle and Washington D.C. is $173,100 to $259,700 USD. EEO Statement All applicants and employees are welcome to apply and will be given equal consideration regardless of race, color, age, religion, pregnancy, sex, sexual orientation, disability, gender identity, national origin, genetic information, veteran status, marital status or prior protected activity. #J-18808-Ljbffr Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation