[Hiring] Platform Engineering Lead @DNAstack

Role Description

The Platform Engineering Lead sets the direction for the team behind the infrastructure our engineers and customers depend on: GCP and AWS environments, Kubernetes, Terraform and Helm, CI/CD, security and the tooling around them.

This is a player-coach role. You lead the team and stay hands-on: you review code, shape architecture and step in on implementation where it matters. You will own four things:

• The growth of the people on the team
• The team's priorities
• The platform roadmap (planned with Product)
• The platform's technical direction

Qualifications

• 8+ years in DevOps, site reliability or platform engineering, including 3+ years managing engineers.
• Experience setting technical direction and priorities for a platform or infrastructure team, and managing senior engineers.
• Production experience with Kubernetes, Terraform and a CI system on GCP or AWS, and the hands-on skill to review and contribute to that work.
• Direct accountability for a cloud budget, with examples of cost reductions you delivered and how you measured them.
• Experience improving developer productivity, with the metrics to show it.
• A track record of automating repetitive operational work to give a small team leverage.
• Experience with SOC 2 or a comparable control framework, and comfort working with health or genomic data where access rules are strict and audited.
• Strong communication, including explaining technical trade-offs and costs to non-technical leaders, and ease working across global time zones.

Requirements

• Direction first.
• Clear, ranked priorities, and a reasoned "not yet" or "no".
• Shared ownership.
• Technical credibility.
• Honest trade-offs.

What You’ll Do

• Lead the team through 1:1s, career conversations, growth plans, performance reviews and hiring.
• Own the team's rituals, including planning, retrospectives and incident reviews.
• Build shared ownership with primary and secondary owners, pairing, shared on-call and written decisions.
• Coach senior engineers and build a culture of individual empowerment, accountability, and collaboration.
• Keep one ranked list of priorities that everyone can see.
• Plan the platform roadmap with Product, ensuring reliability, security, tooling and customer environments are aligned with product features.
• Report progress, risks and spend to the VP of Product Development and the leadership team.
• Set the direction of the platform and decide how technical decisions are made, documented and revisited.
• Guide architecture and stay hands-on through design reviews, code reviews and implementation.
• Define how we measure delivery, including deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, time to restore and build and test durations.
• Own the infrastructure budget across GCP, AWS and related tooling: forecast, track against plan and explain variances.
• Own platform reliability: service level objectives for customer-facing environments, a clear rotation for on-call, deployments, alerts and support requests.
• Partner with our Chief Information Officer and Chief Privacy and Security Officer on SOC 2 controls tracked in Drata.

Benefits

• Remote friendly, with flexible hours and the opportunity to work on-site at our Toronto office.
• Comprehensive health benefits: medical, dental and vision coverage for you and your dependents.
• Three weeks vacation.
• Unlimited sick days.
• Maternity and parental leave top-up programs.
• One-time remote office set-up stipend.
• Career development and learning support.
• Opportunity to participate in DNAstack's Employee Stock Option Program.
• Opportunity to contribute to open science and global data-sharing efforts.