AI Platform Engineering Lead — Hybrid Cloud, K8s & DevOps

Onward Legal Innovation; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 230,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work with flexible remote

Job summary

Onward Legal Innovation is seeking a Platform Engineering Manager in New York City or Washington, D.C., to lead a lean platform team. The role blends people leadership with hands-on work across AI infrastructure, cloud platforms, Kubernetes, IaC, CI/CD and developer tooling.

You will shape enterprise-scale AI deployments, partner with vendors, and drive platform reliability and security while keeping a lean, technically strong team.

Qualifications

• 12+ years across Platform Engineering, DevOps, SRE or Software Engineering, incl. 4+ years leading engineers.
• Strong hands-on engineering capability; not purely managerial.
• Experience building and operating cloud platforms or internal developer platforms at scale.
• Coding capability with Python and/or Go.
• Strong experience with AWS and/or Azure, Kubernetes and Docker.
• Hands-on experience with Terraform, Ansible, Helm, GitOps, Argo CD, Flux or similar.
• Strong CI/CD experience with GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, GitLab CI or Jenkins.
• Strong understanding of AI application and inference infrastructure.
• Experience with Amazon Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, Anthropic or comparable AI platforms.
• Exposure to RAG, AI agents, MCP, model gateways, retrieval, evaluation frameworks and AI observability.
• Understanding of AI platform challenges including model reliability, latency, cost, security, prompt injection, data protection and provider resilience.
• Experience building developer tooling, APIs, SDKs and self-service capabilities.
• Strong knowledge of observability, SRE, platform reliability and security.
• Comfortable operating with ambiguity in transformation environments.
• Experience working with vendors and strategic technology partners.
• Desirable background in a large global enterprise, professional services, financial services or consultancy.

Responsibilities

• Build and lead a small, highly capable Platform Engineering team.
• Shape the platform infrastructure supporting AI and GenAI applications.
• Establish standards for AI deployment, model access, RAG, agent orchestration, evaluation, observability and security.
• Engineer resilient AI platforms addressing outages, quality changes, latency, cost and security risks.
• Remain hands-on with engineering, architecture, code and IaC.
• Own the platform engineering roadmap, technical direction and delivery.
• Design and evolve cloud, Kubernetes, CI/CD and developer platform capabilities.
• Build reusable tooling and services to boost developer productivity.
• Review code, contribute to technical design, and make hands-on architectural decisions.
• Establish engineering standards across CI/CD, IaC, GitOps, cloud and Kubernetes.
• Own platform reliability, SLOs, incident management and operational maturity.
• Collaborate with engineering teams, security, stakeholders and strategic vendors.
• Coach engineers while continuing to contribute technically.

Skills

Platform Engineering

DevOps

SRE

Python

Go

AWS

Azure

Kubernetes

Docker

Terraform

Ansible

GitOps

CI/CD

Observability

Security

Leadership

Ambiguity Handling

Tools

Terraform

Ansible

Helm

GitOps

Argo CD

Flux

GitHub Actions

Azure DevOps

GitLab CI

Job description

Onward Legal Innovation is seeking a Platform Engineering Manager in New York City or Washington, D.C., to lead a lean platform team. The role blends people leadership with hands-on work across AI infrastructure, cloud platforms, Kubernetes, IaC, CI/CD and developer tooling.

You will shape enterprise-scale AI deployments, partner with vendors, and drive platform reliability and security while keeping a lean, technically strong team.