Lead Platform Engineer

ZipRecruiter; San Francisco (CA); Remote; USD 150,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading tech company is seeking a Lead Platform Engineer to evolve and scale their cloud data platform. The role involves designing scalable architectures, collaborating with engineering teams, and ensuring performance amid growth. Candidates should have over 10 years of experience in distributed systems and strong proficiency in TypeScript, Python, and AWS services. This position offers competitive benefits, including unlimited PTO and remote working options.

Benefits

100% employer-paid benefits

Unlimited paid time off (PTO)

401K

Flexible working arrangements

Company paid Life Insurance

Qualifications

• 10+ years of hands-on experience in software and infrastructure engineering.
• Experience as a technical leader or architect.
• Ability to articulate ideas clearly and present findings persuasively.

Responsibilities

• Architect and evolve cloud-platform infrastructure for high-throughput data processing.
• Design distributed systems for capabilities like authentication, lifecycle management, and real-time processing.
• Analyze performance and scalability; define strategies for growth.

Skills

Software and infrastructure engineering

Distributed systems design

API-first design (REST, GraphQL)

TypeScript and Python proficiency

AWS cloud services expertise

Infrastructure-as-code frameworks

Observability best practices

Collaboration skills

Tools

AWS CDK

CloudFormation

CI/CD pipelines

Job description

The Role

As a Lead Platform Engineer, you will play a critical role in evolving and scaling our cloud- Tetra data platform to handle 100× growth in data volume and user demand. You’ll partner with engineering, data, and AI teams to design scalable architectures, proactively anticipate and mitigate scaling challenges, and ensure our platform remains performant, reliable, and cost-efficient as it grows.

This is a highly impactful role for an engineer who’s passionate about distributed systems, understands the trade-offs of large-scale design, and thrives on turning ambitious scalability goals into concrete technical strategies.

If you’re excited by the challenge of architecting cloud- infrastructure to power massive growth and thrive on solving complex scalability problems, we’d love to hear from you.

What You Will Do

• Architect and evolve our cloud- platform infrastructure to support high-throughput, low-latency data processing patterns, customer-facing features, and design platform to meet scalability requirements.
• Design scalable, distributed systems powering complex capabilities such as authentication & authorization, data lifecycle management, search infrastructure, operational intelligence, and real-time event processing.
• Proactively analyze platform performance and scalability; identify potential constraints and define strategies that enable both continuous and step-function growth.
• Collaborate with engineering and product teams to deliver infrastructure that supports new services, customer-facing applications, and high-volume data processing workloads.
• Build and maintain infrastructure-as-code (e.g., CloudFormation, AWS CDK) to automate, standardize, and secure deployments to support online upgrades and on-demand infrastructure allocation.
• Enhance observability and monitoring to ensure reliability, cost efficiency, and rapid incident response.

Champion best practices in distributed systems design, scalability, and performance optimization, and share architectural insights through design reviews and technical documentation.

Requirements

• 10+ years of hands-on experience in software and infrastructure engineering, with a proven track record of designing, building, and scaling distributed, cloud- systems in production environments.
• Demonstrated experience as a technical leader or architect, making key decisions on system design, scalability, performance, and cost optimization.
• Strong proficiency in API-first design, including REST, GraphQL, and OpenAPI specifications designing APIs that are scalable, secure, versioned, and extensible.
• Strong proficiency in TypeScript and Python, with a focus on building highly performant backend services.
• Expertise in AWS cloud services and architecture, including deep experience with core services (e.g., EC2, Lambda, ECS/EKS, IAM, S3) and advanced data and messaging tools such as SQS, Kinesis, Kafka, and EventBridge.
• Expert knowledge of infrastructure-as-code frameworks such as CloudFormation and CDK, CI/CD pipelines, and strong opinions on production deployment strategy across dozens of platforms.
• Solid understanding of observability best practices, including monitoring, alerting, and distributed tracing for SLI/SLO/SLA design.
• Ability to articulate ideas clearly, present findings persuasively, and build rapport with clients and team members.
• Strong collaboration skills and the ability to partner effectively with cross-functional teams.

Benefits

• 100% employer-paid benefits for all eligible employees and immediate family members
• Unlimited paid time off (PTO)
• 401K
• Flexible working arrangements - Remote work
• Company paid Life Insurance, LTD/STD
• A culture of continuous improvement where you can grow your career and get coaching

We are not currently providing visa sponsorship for this position.