MADE Platform Engineering Lead

Overview

Leads the development and maintenance of HKS's internal platform infrastructure that enables application development teams to build and deploy solutions faster, safer, and more consistently. This role focuses on reducing cognitive load for application developers through platform engineering principles, treating internal infrastructure as a product with developers as customers. Open mindset and willingness to embrace emerging platform technologies. Manages the firm's resources (people, processes and tools) and assignments with proficiency, fluency and aptitude.

Teaches and mentors staff and effectively embodies and expresses the firm's values and mission.

• Designs, builds and maintains CI/CD pipeline infrastructure for all applications
• Implements Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform and ARM templates for Azure resource management
• Establishes and evolves microservices framework, API standards, and service contracts
• Creates and maintains developer self-service capabilities and internal tooling
• Leads Azure cloud infrastructure strategy, optimization and cost management
• Manages environment provisioning (dev, test, staging, production) through automation
• Implements disaster recovery, backup strategies and security frameworks
• Handles Azure networking, load balancing and application gateway configuration
• Reduces cognitive load on application development teams through platform abstractions
• Creates "golden path" templates, patterns and scaffolding tools for rapid development
• Gathers and acts on developer feedback to continuously improve platform services
• Streamlines onboarding processes and reduce environment setup time for new developers
• Designs and implements data models that represent architectural concepts, project hierarchies and design workflows
• Establishes architectural workflow automation capabilities and data standardization across design phases
• Implements centralized logging, monitoring, and alerting systems using Azure Monitor and Application Insights
• Builds distributed tracing capabilities and performance monitoring across microservices
• Establishes security frameworks, authentication/authorization systems and secrets management
• Ensures compliance with architectural industry standards and security best practices

• Collaborates closely with Application Development teams to understand platform requirements
• Facilitates platform-application integration and resolves cross-team dependencies
• Provides technical leadership in combined sprint planning and dependency management
• Conducts platform adoption sessions and knowledge transfer with application teams and measures platform adoption, usage metrics, and developer satisfaction
• Maintains platform roadmap aligned with application team needs and business objectives
• Prioritizes platform features based on developer feedback and organizational impact
• Manages platform versioning, deprecation policies and backward compatibility
• Architects test automation strategy for platform services and integration points and implements automated testing frameworks for CI/CD pipelines
• Leads cross-team integration testing between platform and application services
• Coaches application developers on testing practices and platform testing tools
• Leads sophisticated CI/CD implementation for both platform and application deployments
• Manages complex deployment orchestration across multiple microservices
• Implements automated rollback mechanisms and deployment safety measures
• Optimizes deployment frequency and reduces lead-time for changes
• Experiments with emerging technologies (AI/ML, containers, serverless) for platform enhancement
• Integrates Azure AI services to enable intelligent capabilities across platform services to show how AI fits into platform strategy
• Identifies opportunities to reduce manual processes through platform automation
• Makes strategic architectural decisions that enable sustainable team scaling
• Stays current with platform engineering trends, tools, and industry best practices

Education and Experience

• Computer Science, Software Engineering Bachelor's degree, or equivalent combination of education and experience
• Typically 7+ years of experience in platform engineering, Dev Ops, or senior software development roles
• Typically 3+ years of experience leading infrastructure or platform initiatives
• Typically 5+ years with Microsoft Azure including App Services, Functions, Container Instances; advanced proficiency in Azure SQL, Cosmos DB, Storage
• Proven experience scaling development teams through platform engineering
• Proven experience managing multi-team technical coordination and dependencies

Knowledge, Skills, Abilities

• Advanced experience designing and operating CI/CD pipelines (Azure Dev Ops), Infrastructure as Code (ARM, Terraform), internal developer platforms, self-service tooling, observability, and platform-as-a-product practices focused on developer experience required
• Advanced proficiency in ASP.NET, React, modern web frameworks required;…