Senior Platform Engineer

The Foundation

We are the largest nonprofitfighting poverty disease and inequity around the world. Founded on a simple premise: people everywhere regardless of identity or circumstances should have the chance to live healthy productive lives. We believe our employees should reflect the rich diversity of the global populations we aim to serve.We provide an exceptional benefits package to employees and their families which include comprehensive medical dental and vision coverage with no premiums generous paid time off paid family leave foundation-paid retirement contribution regional holidays and opportunities to engage in several employee communities.As a workplace were committed to creating an environment for you to thrive both personally and professionally.

The Team

Your Role

The Gates Foundation is seeking a Senior Platform Engineer to design and scale a modern data and AI platform that accelerates impact across global health development education Gender Equality and humanitarian initiatives.

In this role you will lead the development of a secure governed and scalable platform built on Azure Databricks and Snowflake enabling advanced analytics and responsible generative AI solutions using OpenAI and Claude. You will play a critical role in unlocking insights from both structured and unstructured data (e.g. research reports program documents surveys and field data) and making them accessible through API-driven data services and intelligent search using Azure AI Search.

You will also help ensure that data and AI systems are ethical transparent and aligned with global data governance standards leveraging tools such as Collibra.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the architecture and development of a cloud-native Data and AI platform on Azure Databricks Lakehouse and Snowflake

• Design and implement API-first data platform to enable secure governed data sharing across teams partners and global stakeholders

• Operationalize GenAI solutions for knowledge discovery and decision support including:

  • Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures

  • Integration with OpenAI and Claude APIs

  • Semantic and hybrid search using Azure AI Search

• Create design patterns for document ingestion parsing OCR metadata extraction and enrichment

• Design and implement embedding and vector search strategies for unstructured data

• Lead the implementation of data governance and stewardship practices using Collibra including:

  • Data cataloging lineage and metadata management

  • Data quality frameworks and stewardship workflows

  • Alignment with global privacy security and compliance standards

• Establish secure data access patterns (RBAC/ABAC) ensuring detection (PHI/PII scanning) and protection of sensitive data

• Build reusable platform services APIs and tools that enable self-service analytics and AI development

• Implement observability monitoring and evaluation frameworks for data pipelines and AI/LLM systems

• Optimize platform performance scalability and cost efficiency via FinOps dashboards

• Develop lightweight application for search and discovery cataloging and onboarding new datasets

Your Experience

• Bachelors or masters in computer science or related field or equivalent experience

• Experience with analyzing and extracting insights from health and life sciences data (internal and external public repositories) using analytical and reporting tools

• 12 years experience in platform engineering and/or software engineering with a focus on advanced analytics AI/ML Infrastructure data security and automation

• Manage and drive improvements of a lightweight custom application (Data Portal) for self-service data cataloging search and discovery

• Strong programming skills in Python C# .Net and SQL

• Hands-on experience with:

  • Azure (Data Lake Azure ML Event Hubs etc.)

  • IaC automating infrastructure provisioning using Terraform

  • Databricks (Lakeflow Spark Delta Lake workflows Unity Catalog)

  • Snowflake (Iceberg Horizon catalog Cortex AI secure data sharing)

• Experience designing and building API-driven data platforms (REST/GraphQL microservices)

• Experience working with unstructured data processing

• Familiarity with building data pipelines with Databricks and DBT Cloud and orchestration

• Familiarity with Docker Kubernetes and distributed systems

Additional qualifications:

Strong understanding of:

• RAG architectures embeddings and vector databases

• Document chunking indexing and retrieval strategies

• Previous experience with Salesforce would be a plus

• Experience with document processing/NLP pipelines (OCR entity extraction classification)

• Collibra and Data Governance

The salary range for this role is $157400 to $236000 USD. We recognize high-wage market differences in Seattle and Washington D.C. where our offices are located. The range for this role in these locations is $173100 to $259700 USD. As a mission-driven organization we strive to balance competitive pay with our mission. New hires salaries are typically between the range minimum and the salary range midpoint. Actual placement in the range will depend on a candidates job-related skills experience and expertise as evaluated during the interview process.

Must have unrestricted work authorization in the country where this position is located. The Foundation does not provide immigration-related sponsorship for this role. This includes direct company sponsorship and any work authorization requiring a written submission or other immigration support from the company (eg: H-1B O-1 L-1 E OPT STEM-OPT CPT TN J-1 etc.).

Hiring Requirements

As part of our standard hiring process for new employees employment will be contingent upon successful completion of a background check.

Candidate Accommodations

Were committed to providing an inclusive and accessible hiring experience for all candidates. If you have a disability or medical condition and need an accommodation at any stage of the application or interview processsuch as an ASL interpreter alternative interview format or physical accessibility supportwere happy to help. Please contact with the position number and a brief description of your accommodation needs. Requests will be handled confidentially.

Inclusion Statement

We are dedicated to the belief that all lives have equal value. We strive for a global and cultural workplace that supports ever greater diversity equity and inclusion of voices ideas and approaches and we support this diversity through all our employment practices.

All applicants and employees who are drawn to serve our mission will enjoy equality of opportunity and fair treatment without regard to race color age religion pregnancy sex sexual orientation disability gender identity gender expression national origin genetic information veteran status marital status and prior protected activity.