Engineering Lead, Platform Engineering

Engineering Lead, Platform Engineering

We're hiring a hands-on Engineering Lead to join our Platform Engineering team. You'll lead a small team while remaining actively involved in technical design, implementation, and delivery.

Partnering closely with our Cloud Architect, you'll translate platform strategy and architectural direction into executable work, make day-to-day technical decisions within the team's scope, and help the team deliver high-quality, reliable platform capabilities predictably.

Lead platform engineering and delivery

• Lead the team's day-to-day technical execution, planning, prioritization, and delivery.
• Translate platform strategy and architectural direction into a clear, actionable backlog and break complex initiatives into achievable phases.
• Use AI tools in your own work and help engineers use and build with AI effectively and responsibly, including shared platform capabilities for approved AI models and services.
• Stay hands-on with design, implementation, code review, troubleshooting, and delivery while serving as a technical anchor for the team.
• Build and evolve CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, automation, APIs, and self-service developer workflows that improve safety, consistency, and developer velocity.
• Contribute directly to our AWS, Kubernetes, and Terraform-based platform, improving established patterns and platform capabilities.
• Improve observability and operational readiness through metrics, logging, tracing, dashboards, SLOs, alerting, and production-readiness standards.
• Partner with Architecture, Security, and engineering teams to create secure, reusable paved roads and technical guardrails.
• Maintain visibility into timelines, dependencies, tradeoffs, and risks, removing blockers and communicating clearly with engineering leadership and partners.

Develop the team

• Support and mentor a small team through one-on-ones, feedback, coaching, pairing, and code and design reviews.
• Set clear expectations and help engineers connect their work to team and company outcomes.
• Build a culture grounded in ownership, reliability, inclusion, learning, and measurable impact.
• Take increasing ownership of formal people-management responsibilities as your experience grows, partnering with the VP when escalation or additional support is needed.

Drive operational excellence

• Participate in the Platform Engineering team's on-call responsibilities and continuously improve the reliability of platform-owned systems.
• Reinforce Koalafi's "You Build It, You Own It" model by giving engineering teams the tooling, observability, standards, and guidance they need to operate their systems successfully.
• Support incident response when platform expertise is needed and drive root-cause analysis and durable corrective actions for platform-related incidents.
• Improve runbooks, automation, alerting, escalation paths, and operational tooling to reduce incidents and unnecessary manual work.

About you

• Technical leadership: You've led engineers through technical direction, delivery ownership, mentoring, or people management and can demonstrate strong judgment and accountability for team-level outcomes.
• Delivery ownership: You've owned timelines, priorities, and execution and have been accountable for what a team ships.
• Platform experience: You have 7+ years of hands-on cloud infrastructure or platform engineering experience, with increasing scope and leadership responsibility.
• Strong production experience with Terraform, Kubernetes, AWS, and CI/CD.
• Strong observability fundamentals across metrics, logging, distributed tracing, SLOs/SLIs, dashboards, and alerting.
• Experience building automation with Bash and at least one general-purpose language such as Python or Go.
• Strong troubleshooting and root-cause-analysis skills, with a track record of implementing durable fixes.
• Hands-on experience using AI coding tools such as Git Hub Copilot, Cursor, or Claude in production engineering work.
• Strong judgment when partnering with senior technical peers and the ability to turn complex technical direction into clear plans and measurable outcomes.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience with Istio or other service-mesh technologies.
• Experience with AWS relational databases, serverless architectures, or distributed systems at scale.
• Prior experience as a technical anchor, team lead, or people manager in platform or infrastructure engineering.
• Experience building or operating platform capabilities for AI-enabled applications, such as model APIs or gateways, observability, evaluation infrastructure, agent/tool integrations, or model-serving platforms.
• Familiarity with production AI concerns including security, access control, cost, latency, reliability, and governance.

Location:

Richmond, VA;
Arlington, VA; or Remote (U.S.). Associates near one of our office locations may work in-office, hybrid, or remotely. Remote opportunities are available to candidates throughout the United States.

Salary Range: $174,000-$226,000 per year (depending on experience and location)…