Lead 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

As a Lead Platform Engineer you are an experienced hands-on technical leader responsible for architecting delivering and evolving complex technology solutions that support foundation and affiliate staff around the world. You operate with a high degree of independence serving as a subject matter expert and acting as a practice lead who contributes to technical execution builds team capability and mentors engineers. You translate complex organizational and technical problems into actionable tactical plans partnering across service teams and being accountable for outcomesnot just deliverables.

In this role you provide technical leadership across multiple platforms and domains shape solution strategy contribute to technical execution and guide engineering excellence across the organization. You serve as a trusted advisor to IT leadership and business partners helping translate long-term organizational needs into scalable secure sustainable technology capabilities. You influence architectural direction coach engineering teams and ensure the overall health usability and reliability of the systems entrusted to your stewardship. Your work directly strengthens the foundations ability to operate effectively and advance its mission globally.

What Youll Do

Technology & Architecture Leadership

• Define and evolve multi-year Data and AI platform roadmaps aligned to enterprise architecture security standards and business strategies.

• Work with business leaders globally to understand business needs translate requirements to meaningful design artifacts and implement data and AI tooling for Enterprise Data Platform (EDP).

• Implement Data and AI governance controls data and platform level security best practices as we continue to build out EDP.

• Provide platform architectural leadership and hands-on development of frameworks (example: Data Classification data auditing etc.) on complex cross-team initiatives ensuring solutions are scalable secure resilient and maintainable.

• Lead platform tools frameworks and vendor evaluations guiding build vs. buy decisions and ensuring alignment with enterprise technical direction.

• Develop and promote engineering standards reference architectures and data access design patterns used across IT and partner teams.

• Anticipate technology impacts across applications data integrations and infrastructureand guide teams through informed trade-off decisions including assessing new technology.

Solution Delivery & Continuous Improvement

• Develop design patterns for developing and governing data and agentic AI applications on EDP using Databricks foundation models OpenAI Claude Snowflake Cortex etc.

• Manage and drive improvements of a lightweight custom application (Data Portal) for self-service data cataloging search and discovery and data sharing with internal and external users.

• Day-to-day hands-on execution and implementation of solutions initiatives processes and practices.

• Lead and oversee technical direction for large multi-team delivery efforts ensuring application of modern engineering and DevSecOps practices through completion.

• Conduct architectural and technical reviews of solution designs code and delivery approaches to raise quality and consistency.

• Champion automation governance observability and operational excellence to ensure platforms remain reliable performant and cost effective.

• Pilot emerging technologies and guide their adoption into stable enterprise capabilities when appropriate.

• Drive continuous improvement of engineering practices tooling automation and operational processes.

Service & Portfolio Strategy

• Partner with service managers and product owners to shape service strategies roadmaps and investment priorities.

• Translate complex system challenges into actionable plans that improve sustainability lifecycle health and user experience.

• Provide senior-level input to annual planning including resource needs modernization opportunities risks and capacity considerations.

• Represent technology perspectives in strategic and portfolio discussions ensuring alignment between business direction and technical capability.

Leadership Influence & Collaboration

• Serve as a practice lead SME and senior mentor; coach engineers and contingent staff as well as manage service partners.

• Build strong collaborative relationships across IT Business Operations and programmatic teams.

• Lead cross-functional architecture and design discussions guiding teams through ambiguity with clarity sound judgment and tactical planning.

• Communicate effectively across technical and non-technical audiences including senior leadership translating complex concepts into clear implications and recommendations.

• Represent IT in foundation working groups governance forums and cross-team initiatives ensuring alignment with broader strategies and priorities.

• Lead core initiatives partnering across PSTs Ops and IT.

Your Experience

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

• 12 years experience in data platforms with a focus on advanced analytics AI/ML Infrastructure data security and automation.

• Experience in implementing managed and custom MCP servers.

• Experience in working on data platform architecture processing of unstructured data and extracting insights.

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

• Experienced in working with business users and co-developing solutions on EDP using Databricks Azure and governing AI applications.

• Hands-on experience with:

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

  • IaC automating infrastructure provisioning using Terraform

  • Databricks experience is a must (Lakeflow Spark Delta Lake Databricks Applications Unity Catalog)

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

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

• Experience with data sharing with internal and external users cataloging external data platforms is preferred.

• 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.

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

• Collibra data catalog and Data Governance.

• Deep expertise with cloud-based infrastructure (Azure preferred) networking identity security automation and cost optimization.

• Advanced experience with CI/CD pipelines infrastructure as code cloud-native operational models and modern version control strategies.

• Proficiency with programming and scripting languages such as C# .Net Python or PowerShell is desirable.

• Previous experience with Salesforce would be a plus.

• Excellent communication and influencing skills.

*Must have unrestricted work authorization in the country where this position islocated.

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.).

The salary range for this role is $190100to $294700USD. We recognize high-wage market differences in our offices arelocated. The range for this role in these locations is $209100to $ 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 andexpertise as evaluated during the interview process.

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.