Platform Engineering Lead - Control Plane & AI Ops

The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

Dental insurance

Life insurance

Vision insurance

401(k) with employer match

Tuition assistance

Paid parental leave

Backup family care

Flexible time off

Work location flexibility

Job summary

The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America is seeking a Head of Platform Engineering – Control Plane in New York to lead a scalable, governed execution platform. You will drive automation, standards, and policy engines across enterprise teams.

You will own roadmaps for identity, access, observability, FinOps, and lifecycle workflows, mentor engineers, and partner with product, security, and risk teams to deliver reliable platform capabilities.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in computer science, engineering, management, or a related field.
• Strong people leadership experience managing software engineering teams.
• Deep hands‑on technical background designing, building, and operating distributed, cloud‑native platform services in production.
• Experience leading platform, infrastructure, developer platform, AI/ML platform, security platform, or other reusable enterprise engineering capabilities.
• Strong understanding of enterprise governance, security, risk, compliance, and operational controls required to safely run AI or data‑intensive systems in production.
• Experience building reliable APIs, registries, workflow services, policy engines, or orchestration services with clear contracts for downstream engineering teams.
• Proven ability to drive engineering excellence through architecture reviews, design standards, testing, CI/CD, observability, incident response, reliability practices, and operational metrics.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with cross‑functional teams to develop automation solutions that drive growth and reduce costs.
• Own the roadmap and delivery for control plane capabilities including IAM, tenant boundaries, policy enforcement, approvals, evaluation gates, observability, auditability, FinOps, secrets management, and lifecycle workflows.
• Build and scale a scalable, governed execution plane.
• Establish reliable APIs, registries, workflow services, policy engines, and orchestration services with clear contracts for downstream engineering teams.
• Drive engineering excellence through architecture reviews, testing, CI/CD, observability, incident response, and metrics.
• Partner with product, architecture, security, risk, compliance, operations, and domain teams to turn platform needs into scalable outcomes.
• Communicate with senior stakeholders, simplify complex topics, align teams around platform standards.
• Lead and mentor engineering teams, including hiring and performance management.

Skills

People leadership

Platform engineering

Cloud-native design

AWS cloud

CI/CD practices

Observability

Security governance

RBAC/ABAC

MLOps

AI governance

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in computer science or related field

Tools

Bedrock

SageMaker

Lambda

DynamoDB

API Gateway

EKS

IAM

CloudWatch

Job description

The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America is seeking a Head of Platform Engineering – Control Plane in New York to lead a scalable, governed execution platform. You will drive automation, standards, and policy engines across enterprise teams.

You will own roadmaps for identity, access, observability, FinOps, and lifecycle workflows, mentor engineers, and partner with product, security, and risk teams to deliver reliable platform capabilities.