Team Lead, DevX Platform Service

Role overview

The DevX PaaS team builds and operates Car Gurus' Kubernetes-based developer platform that enables product teams to ship quickly, reliably, and 're a sub-team within Developer Experience in Engineering Platform, partnering across engineering to remove friction, modernize our stack, and accelerate time-to-market.

This is a player‑coach leadership role. As Team Lead, you'll own the day‑to‑day leadership of a small team of engineers — running ceremonies, planning quarterly capacity, growing the people on your team, and serving as the primary point of contact for PaaS across Engineering Platform — while staying technically hands‑on enough to make meaningful contributions on our most important platform work — autoscaling, agentic automation of cluster maintenance and upgrades, service discovery, and the continued evolution of our proprietary Mach5 platform with AWS‑native capabilities.

You'll be the connective tissue between our platform's technical direction and the developers who depend on it every day.

Three big bets anchor the team's near‑term direction: keeping Kubernetes healthy and cost‑efficient through autoscaling and increasingly automated maintenance; piloting an AI‑assisted support model for developer questions (starting with PaaS); and standing up service discovery (and eventually service mesh) to simplify how services connect. Everything below ladders up to these themes.

• Own team operations for DevX PaaS: run 1:1s, sprint ceremonies, and quarterly capacity and project planning, and represent PaaS in Engineering Platform planning and prioritization forums.
• Grow the engineers on your team through coaching, feedback, and equitable allocation of high‑impact, growth‑oriented work — including an "epic lead" model where engineers own end‑to‑end delivery of major initiatives.
• Shape the team's quarterly portfolio so that the team's energy is spent on the highest‑leverage work, balancing a heavy load of non‑discretionary platform work (upgrades, migrations, maintenance, on‑call) against modernization and strategic initiatives.
• Be the primary point of contact for PaaS across Engineering Platform — framing problems, aligning on scope, and making sure downstream teams understand impacts and timelines.

• Help design, build, and operate the Kubernetes platform on AWS EKS with a focus on reliability, security, and developer ergonomics (multi‑env, multi‑region).
• Guide the team's Controller/Operator and deployment model (e.g., CGService) to provide consistent, self‑service delivery across repositories and environments.
• Lead critical upgrades and rollouts:
  Kubernetes, Rancher, and routine add‑on upgrades utilizing ArgoCD and HCP Terraform.
• Set the direction for autoscaling across product and EP services — driving automated scale‑down, day‑2 EKS optimizations, and cost/performance wins in partnership with product teams.
• Champion agentic and AI‑assisted workflows for cluster maintenance — automating EKS upgrades, PR generation, and bundled maintenance to reduce manual toil and create predictable, low‑disruption maintenance windows.
• Advance service discovery (and eventually service mesh) to provide a robust, automated way for services to find and communicate with each other, reducing hard‑coded dependencies and improving system resilience.
• Expand our proprietary Mach5 platform with AWS‑native capabilities, continuing to shield developers from Kubernetes complexity while modernizing the underlying stack.
• Guide remaining platform modernization, including the tail end of the ingress‑nginx retirement / Gateway API migration, to simplify developer configuration and reduce operational toil.
• Pilot a more scalable, AI‑assisted support model for developer questions — starting with PaaS — by curating documentation, embedding AI into the support flow, and reducing the manual triage burden on the team.
• Raise platform reliability by hardening alerting/runbooks and participating in the team's on‑call rotation with sensible, business‑hours expectations and documented handoffs.

• Represent PaaS in EP‑level forums (all‑hands, capacity planning,…