Senior Platform Engineer: Data & AI Architect

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 190,100 - 324,100; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Comprehensive medical, dental, and vis

Paid time off

Paid family leave

Foundation-paid retirement

Regional holidays

Employee communities

Job summary

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation seeks a Lead Platform Engineer to architect, deliver, and evolve complex technology solutions for global staff. You will lead platform decisions, mentor engineers, and translate complex problems into actionable plans across service teams.

You will define roadmaps for Data & AI, implement governance, and drive continuous improvement with automation, security, and scalable data tooling. This role requires strong leadership and cross-functional collaboration.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s in computer science or related field or equivalent experience.
• 12+ years of experience in data platforms with focus on advanced analytics, AI/ML infrastructure, data security, and automation.
• Experience with data platform architecture, processing of unstructured data, and extracting insights; health/Life sciences data experience.
• Hands-on with Databricks (Lakeflow, Spark, Delta Lake, Unity Catalog), Docker, Kubernetes; API gateways; data cataloging and governance.
• Strong understanding of RAG architectures, embeddings, vector databases, NLP pipelines; cloud infra (Azure preferred); security, automation, and cost optimization.
• CI/CD, infrastructure as code, modern version control; programming/scripting in C#/.NET, Python, or PowerShell desirable.

Responsibilities

• Lead Platform Engineer: act as a technical leader for architecture, delivery, and evolution of complex solutions.
• Provide hands-on leadership as SME and practice lead; mentor engineers; translate problems into actionable plans.
• Define and evolve multi-year Data & AI platform roadmaps aligned to security and business strategy.
• Develop design patterns for data/AI apps on EDP and manage a lightweight Data Portal for self-service data cataloging.
• Oversee large multi-team delivery with modern engineering, DevSecOps, governance, and automation practices.

Skills

Technical leadership

Data & AI platform

Cloud infrastructure

Security & governance

Education

CS degree or related field

Tools

Databricks

Azure

Terraform

Snowflake

API gateways

Docker

Kubernetes

Collibra

Unity Catalog

Job description

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation seeks a Lead Platform Engineer to architect, deliver, and evolve complex technology solutions for global staff. You will lead platform decisions, mentor engineers, and translate complex problems into actionable plans across service teams.

You will define roadmaps for Data & AI, implement governance, and drive continuous improvement with automation, security, and scalable data tooling. This role requires strong leadership and cross-functional collaboration.