Lead Platform Engineer

About Us

Clayco is a full-service, turnkey real estate development, master planning, architecture, engineering, and construction firm that safely delivers clients across North America the highest quality solutions on time, on budget, and above and beyond expectations. With $8.1 billion in revenue for 2025, Clayco specializes in the "art and science of building," providing fast track, efficient solutions for mission critical, industrial, life sciences, power & energy, aviation, commercial, institutional, residential and sports & entertainment related building projects.

The Role We Want You For

We're building a Platform Engineering function inside our Infrastructure Services organization with architectural and technical leadership at its core. The mission is clear: design, build, and lead the evolution of a platform that makes it easy to build and operate reliable infrastructure and delivery workflows - first for our cloud and network engineering teams, and then for partners across application integrations, data engineering, and technologist business teams.

We're looking for a technically exceptional engineer who has built platform tool chains and infrastructure automation from the ground up. Someone ready to take technical ownership: architecting solutions, executing on technical direction, and leading the implementation of how infrastructure gets built and shipped across the organization. This isn't a role where you're handed a mature platform and asked to maintain it.

This is a role where you architect and build the foundation from scratch - designing the systems, modules, and automated workflows that become the organizational standard. You'll drive the technical implementation, establish patterns, and help shape how platform engineering evolves here. And importantly: we're AI-forward by design. Senior leadership is all-in on AI, and we want someone who is genuinely excited to apply AI to infrastructure automation, delivery workflows, and operational excellence not as a buzzword, but as a multiplier.

The Specifics of the Role

You'll architect and lead the technical implementation of reusable building blocks and infrastructure automation that make delivery consistent, safe, and fast across the organization. Working with leadership on direction, you'll own the execution and drive adoption:

CI/CD golden paths

* Lead the design and implementation of Git Hub-based CI/CD standards: architect a comprehensive library of pipelines that cover infrastructure use cases (Terraform workflows, promotion patterns, validations, approvals, environment strategies), working with leadership to establish patterns that become organizational canon.

* Establish and drive adoption of pipeline design principles and best practices so teams follow proven patterns rather than inventing delivery every sprint; lead the evolution as requirements change.

* Design guardrails that are both powerful and usable (linting, validation, policy checks, secret handling) - working with leadership to decide what gets enforced, where, and why.

Terraform modules that encode best practices

* Architect and build a Terraform module library that encodes organizational best practices designing module interfaces, setting composition patterns, and ensuring consistency across infrastructure definitions.

* Architect best-practice-by-default patterns in collaboration with leadership - covering security posture, naming conventions, tagging strategy, observability-ready architecture, and forward-thinking cloud capabilities.

* Partner with cloud and network engineers as a technical leader: ensure modules are practical, scalable, and usable, while driving adoption and setting expectations for how platform capabilities scale across teams.

* Build Disaster Recovery into the building blocks, not bespoke solutions by service.

AI-first workflows for infrastructure and operations

* Lead the technical implementation of AI-enabled workflows working with leadership on strategy: evaluate and integrate Enterprise AI tools (ChatGPT, Git Hub Copilot, Claude, and emerging agent frameworks) into infrastructure and operational processes, always looking for opportunities to accelerate delivery and eliminate toil.

* Drive thoughtful technical decision-making across the platform by integrating AI-assisted analysis and automation - turning data and insights into better infrastructure decisions.

* Lead the evolution of incident response and operational workflows - using AI and automation to make incident response faster, smarter, and more consistent.

* Pioneer the next evolution of AI-powered infrastructure working with leadership: explore and architect agent-based systems (workflow engines like n8n, agentic AI patterns) for PR generation, intelligent incident handling, and autonomous runbook execution - driving both the technical implementation and organizational readiness for this shift.

Requirements

* Terraform/Terraform Cloud expertise: you have built and shipped real Terraform work at scale, with deep…