Senior Platform Engineer

Senior Platform Engineer

Location:

Kansas City, MO

Onsite Flexibility:
Onsite

• Position Type:
  Contract
• Contract Duration: 5 months
• Pay Rate: $68.00–$74.00 / Hour (USD)
• Work Authorization:
  Applicants must be authorized to work for ANY employer in the U.S. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment Visa at this time.

The Senior Platform Engineer leads the design and delivery of platforms and drives strategic improvements to developer experience across the organization. They own complex automation initiatives, architect self-service capabilities around infrastructure and application delivery, and serve as a primary escalation point and technical mentor for assistant and staff level engineers.

• Leads and champions Dev Ops practices and culture across the organization, driving automation strategy for infrastructure provisioning and application delivery. Creates processes and conversations to drive improvements related to deployment frequency, failure change rate, mean time to recover (MTTR), and lead time, and sets measurable targets for improvement.
• Partners with architects and writes well-crafted code to provision infrastructure and deploy applications ablishes patterns, standards, and reusable components that other engineers follow. Documents trade-offs to different approaches and documents architectural decisions.
• Serves as a strategic partner to engineering teams on developer experience. Proactively identifies systemic pain points and process bottlenecks, leads initiatives to resolve them, and builds lasting trust across teams through consistent delivery and deep technical empathy.
• Independently scopes and leads complicated work streams, defining requirements and acceptance criteria in collaboration with stakeholders. Operates effectively in ambiguous environments and guides the team through uncertainty and change.
• Evaluates, selects, and owns the toolchain for developer productivity — particularly CI/CD pipelines — ensuring the software development lifecycle is fast, safe, and reliable. Drives adoption of new tooling and practices across the organization.
• Defines and owns SLO (service level objective) and SLI (service level indicator) frameworks for platform and application health. Leads incident response, conducts blameless post-mortems, and drives systemic improvements to observability and reliability.
• Mentors and coaches engineers at all levels, conducts code and architecture reviews, and contributes to hiring and team development.
• Commitment to continuous learning and improvement.
• All other duties as assigned.

• Deep expertise in building and operating cloud infrastructure in GCP, Azure, or AWS. Mastery of IaC (Infrastructure as Code) tools such as Terraform or Pulumi, including authoring reusable modules and enforcing organizational standards.
• Strong software engineering skills with extensive experience scripting and building tooling in Bash, Python, Power Shell, Go, or similar languages.
• Expert-level proficiency with Git, including branch strategies, code review workflows, and release management practices.
• Strong understanding of TCP/IP networking, DNS, certificate management, and network security principles as applied to cloud and hybrid environments.
• Extensive hands-on experience designing, building, and operating CI/CD pipelines and the tooling ecosystems around them. Able to evaluate tradeoffs and make architectural recommendations on build and deployment systems.
• Advanced computer skills (e.g., Microsoft Office Suite).
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Ability to lead projects and delegate work tasks to team members. Ability to lead the execution of work and resolve issues in a team environment.
• Demonstrated critical thinking skills and ability to work methodically and analytically in a problem-solving environment.
• Strong attention to detail, facilitation, team building, and collaboration.

• Bachelor's Degree in technology, business, or a related field required — or applicable years of experience may be substituted for the degree requirement.

• Minimum of 8 years of…