Senior Platform Engineer

Senior Platform Engineer

We are seeking an experienced Senior Platform Engineer to support a long-term contract opportunity in Kansas City, MO. This role will lead the design and delivery of platforms while driving strategic improvements to developer experience across the organization.

The Senior Platform Engineer will own complex automation initiatives, architect self-service capabilities for infrastructure and application delivery, and serve as a primary escalation point and technical mentor for engineers across the organization.

• Lead and champion Dev Ops practices and culture across the organization, driving automation strategies for infrastructure provisioning and application delivery.
• Establish processes and facilitate discussions focused on improving deployment frequency, change failure rate, mean time to recovery (MTTR), and lead time for changes, while setting measurable targets for continuous improvement.
• Partner with architects and engineering teams to write well-crafted code that provisions infrastructure and deploys applications at scale.
• Establish engineering patterns, standards, and reusable components for use across the organization.
• Document technical trade-offs, architectural decisions, and design approaches.
• Serve as a strategic partner to engineering teams on developer experience and productivity.
• Proactively identify systemic pain points, process bottlenecks, and opportunities for improvement.
• Lead initiatives to resolve technical and operational challenges while building trust across teams through consistent delivery and strong technical collaboration.
• Independently scope and lead complex work streams, defining requirements and acceptance criteria in collaboration with stakeholders.
• Operate effectively in ambiguous environments and guide teams through uncertainty and organizational change.
• Evaluate, select, and own tooling that supports developer productivity, particularly CI/CD pipelines and related software development lifecycle tools.
• Ensure development and delivery processes are fast, secure, reliable, and scalable.
• Drive adoption of new tools, technologies, and engineering practices across the organization.
• Define and own SLO (Service Level Objective) and SLI (Service Level Indicator) frameworks for platform and application health.
• Lead incident response efforts, conduct blameless post-mortems, and drive systemic improvements to observability and reliability.
• Mentor and coach engineers at all levels.
• Conduct code reviews and architecture reviews.
• Contribute to hiring, team development, and broader engineering initiatives.
• Maintain a commitment to continuous learning and continuous improvement.
• Perform all other duties as assigned.

• Bachelor's degree in Technology, Business, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field and a minimum of 8 years of relevant experience required; applicable years of experience may be substituted for the degree requirement.
• Minimum of 8 years of experience in platform engineering, infrastructure, Dev Ops, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), or a closely related technical discipline.
• Deep expertise building and operating cloud infrastructure in GCP, Azure, or AWS.
• Mastery of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) 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 using Bash, Python, Power Shell, Go, or similar programming 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 that support them.
• Ability to evaluate technical tradeoffs and make architectural recommendations related to build and deployment systems.
• Advanced computer skills, including proficiency with Microsoft Office Suite.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Demonstrated ability to lead projects, delegate work, and guide the execution of complex initiatives.
• Ability to resolve issues effectively and collaborate within a team environment.
• Demonstrated critical thinking skills and the ability to work methodically and analytically in a problem-solving environment.
• Strong attention to detail, facilitation, team-building, and collaboration skills.

Candidates must be legally authorized to work permanently in the country where this position is located, without time limitations, restrictions, or the need for employment sponsorship.