Lead Platform Engineer

At McAfee, you'll architect and lead platform solutions in a fast-paced environment where innovation shapes enterprise infrastructure. As a Lead Application Platform Engineer, you'll set technical direction, establish patterns and standards for platform teams, and drive architectural decisions that impact multiple product engineering groups. This technical leadership role elevates developer productivity and operational excellence across the organization.

The Lead Application Platform Engineer operates as a technical leader — not a manager — bringing depth, influence, and mentorship. This engineer sets the patterns and standards the platform team builds on, serves as the escalation point for production issues, and is the technical voice engineering leaders consult before major commitments. The role combines deep expertise in application architecture, platform engineering, and distributed systems with the ability to mentor and influence other engineers.

• Embed with two to three assigned product engineering groups, participating as a functional team member while maintaining a broader platform perspective.
• Own and evolve reference architectures—a curated set of blessed patterns (synchronous services, asynchronous workers, data pipelines) with Infrastructure-as-Code starters, monitoring checklists, runbook templates, and cost models.
• Act as the escalation point for production and architecture problems across multiple engineering groups; lead technical response to major incidents alongside SRE.
• Set the technical standard for the platform team: define the bar for review approach, testing depth, instrumentation baseline, and what 'operationally ready' means in practice.
• Mentor two to four Application Platform Engineers, including onboarding new hires into unfamiliar product domains and codebases; grow the technical capabilities of the team.
• Represent platform constraints and capabilities in architecture discussions with engineering leadership; carry group constraints back into Release Engineering and SRE roadmaps.
• Drive structural fixes after major incidents; lead the analysis of root causes and oversee implementation of preventive measures.
• Evaluate and introduce tooling (AI-assisted development, test generation, performance and security tools); prove value before team standardization.
• Design multi-service architectures and reason about failure modes, blast radius, data consistency, and cost before code is written.
• Contribute meaningfully in at least two of Go, Python, Node.js/Type Script, Java, or .NET; comfortable in a third at short notice.
• Lead capacity and scalability analysis; interpret profiling and tracing data to locate bottlenecks across service boundaries.
• Build internal tooling and automation frameworks that the rest of the platform team depends on, including AI-assisted migration and review workflows.
• Drive security remediation strategy across the software supply chain; manage and prioritize remediation across multiple teams.

• 9+ years in software, platform, or reliability engineering with deep hands-on coding experience that is still current.
• Demonstrated ownership of architecture patterns adopted by teams outside your own.
• Experience operating high-traffic distributed systems in production; leadership in incident response and post-incident structural work.
• Track record of raising the technical bar of a team through mentoring and standard-setting.
• Expert-level proficiency in Go (Golang), Python, and Node.js/Type Script; strong
• competency in Dart/Flutter; able to read and architect in Java, Kotlin, Swift, Objective-C, C++, C, Rust, and C#/.NET.
• Deep expertise in AWS (EKS, Lambda, RDS, S3, IAM, VPC) and production-grade Kubernetes across multiple…