Senior Platform Engineer I - Evergreen

Role Description:

Building Software Applications

• Application Engineering: Responsible for building software applications using relevant development languages, systems, services, and tools tailored to the business domain, while guiding junior team members.
• Code Optimization: Refactors and simplifies codebases using established design patterns, setting architectural standards for junior engineers.
• Quality Assurance: Ensures application quality and reliability by adhering to standard testing strategies, techniques, and automated testing methods.
• Maintainable Code: Writes readable, reusable, and modular code by enforcing standardized design patterns and leveraging core software libraries.
• Data Security & Governance: Enforces data security, integrity, and compliance standards across applications in alignment with organizational best practices.

Software Systems Design

• Architectural Evaluation: Evaluates architectural solutions by balancing operational cost, technical constraints, business goals, and emerging technologies.
• Impact Analysis: Assesses system dependencies and models the structural implications of adding or modifying applications within the broader architecture.
• Rapid Prototyping: Accelerates business growth and technical discovery through prototyping, technical spikes, and third-party vendor evaluations.
• Scalable Solution Design: Designs adaptable systems that satisfy immediate operational needs while remaining extensible for future capability expansions.

End-to-End System Ownership

• Service Lifecycle Management: Owns services end-to-end by monitoring application health, defining critical metrics (SLIs/SLOs), and resolving operational drifts.
• Risk Mitigation & Documentation: Reduces business continuity risks and eliminates single points of dependency by maintaining clear runbooks, OpDocs, and technical documentation.
• Continuous Delivery: Accelerates customer feedback loops and reduces deployment risk through continuous integration, progressive delivery, and feature experimentation frameworks.
• Production Autonomy: Independently manages production deployment pipelines, infrastructure operations, and release management while mentoring junior engineers.

Technical Incident Management

• SLA-Driven Mitigation: Diagnoses and resolves live production outages to minimize customer impact and adhere to established service level agreements.
• Root Cause Analysis (RCA): Eliminates recurring failures and builds systemic resilience through thorough root-cause investigations and long-term bug fixes.
• Postmortem Process: Contributes to post-incident reviews, tracks production failure modes, and maintains centralized incident logs.

Automation and Toil Reduction

• Technical Debt Elimination: Keeps infrastructure components up to date by addressing operational bottlenecks, removing technical debt, and planning for capacity scale.
• Operational Efficiency: Reduces infrastructure maintenance costs by adopting automated workflows, leveraging modern technologies, and managing vendor integrations.
• Toil Elimination: Eliminates manual operational tasks by developing custom software utilities, internal tools, and automation scripts targeting latency and scaling goals.

Monitoring and Alerting Improvements

• Observability Strategy: Monitors capacity, infrastructure health, and key business indicators (KPIs) to maintain peak application performance and system availability.
• Reliability Partnership: Partners with software development teams to define appropriate telemetry, trace contexts, and custom observability metrics.

Critical Thinking

• Pattern Recognition: Analyzes complex, high-stress technical scenarios to identify systemic issues and implement structured, logical solutions.
• Solution Evaluation: Constructively evaluates proposals and architectures, applying 'SMART' framework improvements backed by objective data and industry standards.

Continuous Quality and Process Improvement

• Process Optimization: Identifies operational and structural inefficiencies across workflow systems to drive measurable performance improvements.
• Standardization: Designs and rolls out modern engineering standards, updated process flows, and delivery best practices to improve overall team output.

Effective Communication

• Targeted Communication: Delivers clear, well-structured technical messaging adapted to both executive and technical audiences across varied mediums.
• Consensus Building: Facilitates technical alignment through active listening, clear negotiation, and adaptable problem-solving.
• Active Engagement: Asks targeted follow-up questions to uncover technical requirements, clarify ambiguity, and align cross-functional teams.

Architectural Guidance

• Technical Direction: Advises product and application teams on architectural designs to ensure functional, non-functional, and enterprise requirements are met.
• Target Architecture Alignment: Sets strategic technical directions by evaluating legacy systems and aligning target architectures with stakeholders.

Coaching/Mentoring

• Team Enablement: Coaches, mentors, and upskills team members across all levels by sharing technical expertise, operational knowledge, and engineering best practices.

Level of Education

• Master degree

Years of relevant Job Knowledge. Years of relevant Job Knowledge

• Advanced Knowledge (8+ years)

Requirements of special knowledge/skills

• Building Software Applications
• Software System Design
• End to End System Ownership
• Technical Incident Management
• Operations (Automation, Toil)
• Observability (Monitoring; Alerting)
• Critical Thinking
• Continuous Quality & Process Improvement
• Effective Communication
• Architectural Guidance
• Coaching & Mentoring