Platform Engineering Lead: Cloud, CI/CD & Automation

thoughtworksreferral; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Thoughtworks is seeking a Lead Platform Engineer to architect and maintain scalable infrastructure, APIs, and developer tooling. You will enable autonomous delivery Pipelines, CI/CD, and governance across cloud environments to empower engineering teams.

You will drive security, performance and reliability while guiding platform strategies and tooling decisions. The role requires deep GCP experience, Terraform-based IaC, and strong scripting, with hands-on Kubernetes and observability expertise.

Qualifications

• GCP expertise across GKE, Compute, Storage, VPC and serverless services; multi-cloud familiarity (AWS/Azure).
• Terraform IaC mastery; configuration automation with Ansible or Chef.
• Proven DevOps, CI/CD and GitOps experience; robust infra test automation (Terratest, Kitchen, InSpec).
• Observability knowledge with Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic or ELK Stack for troubleshooting.
• Cloud security practices (IAM, encryption, network policies) with continuous monitoring.
• Data infra experience: cloud storage, high-throughput pipelines, NoSQL databases.
• Containerization depth (Docker, Helm) and Kubernetes platforms (GKE).
• Programming/scripting to automate workflows and integrate RESTful APIs in microservices.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement and maintain scalable platform infrastructure for development and production environments.
• Drive automation and CI/CD pipelines for faster deployments and operations.
• Ensure security, scalability and high availability to meet SLAs.
• Troubleshoot platform issues, perform root cause analysis and communicate outcomes.
• Implement and oversee containerization and cloud services (Docker, Kubernetes; AWS, GCP, Azure).
• Champion IaC to define and manage platform resources.
• Support DevOps and GitOps to streamline deployments and collaboration.
• Tune performance, enable dynamic auto-scaling and optimize cloud costs.

Skills

GCP expertise

CI/CD automation

GitOps practices

Programming scripting

Monitoring & alerting

Security best practices

Tools

Terraform

Ansible

Chef

Docker

Kubernetes

Helm

GKE

Job description

Thoughtworks is seeking a Lead Platform Engineer to architect and maintain scalable infrastructure, APIs, and developer tooling. You will enable autonomous delivery Pipelines, CI/CD, and governance across cloud environments to empower engineering teams.

You will drive security, performance and reliability while guiding platform strategies and tooling decisions. The role requires deep GCP experience, Terraform-based IaC, and strong scripting, with hands-on Kubernetes and observability expertise.