Lead Application Platform Engineer

McAfee • Frisco, TX

18h

About The Position

At McAfee, you'll architect and lead platform solutions in a fast-paced environment where innovation shapes enterprise infrastructure. As a Lead Application Platform Engineer, you'll set technical direction, establish patterns and standards for platform teams, and drive architectural decisions that impact multiple product engineering groups. This technical leadership role elevates developer productivity and operational excellence across the organization. The Lead Application Platform Engineer operates as a technical leader — not a manager — bringing depth, influence, and mentorship. This engineer sets the patterns and standards the platform team builds on, serves as the escalation point for production issues, and is the technical voice engineering leaders consult before major commitments. The role combines deep expertise in application architecture, platform engineering, and distributed systems with the ability to mentor and influence other engineers.

Requirements

• 9+ years in software, platform, or reliability engineering with deep hands-on coding experience that is still current.
• Demonstrated ownership of architecture patterns adopted by teams outside your own.
• Experience operating high-traffic distributed systems in production; leadership in incident response and post-incident structural work.
• Track record of raising the technical bar of a team through mentoring and standard-setting.
• Expert-level proficiency in Go (Golang), Python, and Node.js/TypeScript; strong competency in Dart/Flutter; able to read and architect in Java, Kotlin, Swift, Objective-C, C++, C, Rust, and C#/.NET.
• Deep expertise in AWS (EKS, Lambda, RDS, S3, IAM, VPC) and production-grade Kubernetes across multiple deployments.
• Working knowledge of GCP/GKE and multi-cloud architecture patterns.
• Advanced expertise in Terraform, Terragrunt, CloudFormation, and Infrastructure-as-Code at scale.
• Mastery of CI/CD automation with GitHub Actions and Harness; expertise in build optimization, artifact management, and security scanning.
• Advanced knowledge of observability: OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing (Tempo), metrics (Prometheus, Grafana), and alerting (CloudWatch, Datadog, Instana).
• Deep expertise in performance testing, capacity planning, and scalability analysis using K6, Locust, or JMeter.
• Advanced knowledge of databases (DynamoDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, SQL Server) and query optimization.
• Expertise with event-driven architectures and message streaming (Confluent Kafka, Redis).
• Security supply chain mastery: SonarQube, BlackDuck/Coverity, Dependabot, JFrog; ability to architect and drive remediation strategies.
• Expert use of AI-assisted development tools (Claude Code, GitHub Copilot) and ability to evaluate new AI tooling for team adoption.

Nice To Haves

• Mobile DevOps mastery (Fastlane with Flutter/Dart, Swift, Kotlin builds; mobile testing automation).
• Advanced experience with Kong API gateway, Okta RBAC, and Backstage-based developer platforms.
• Deep familiarity with internal service frameworks (Gofr, NodeFr/Zode).
• LLM integration, prompt engineering, and agentic AI orchestration experience.
• Published technical writing or speaking about platform engineering, architecture, or DevOps at conferences.
• Cloud Solutions Architect certifications (AWS, GCP).
• Kubernetes certifications (CKA, CKAD, CKS).

Responsibilities

• Embed with two to three assigned product engineering groups, participating as a functional team member while maintaining a broader platform perspective.
• Own and evolve reference architectures—a curated set of blessed patterns (synchronous services, asynchronous workers, data pipelines) with Infrastructure-as-Code starters, monitoring checklists, runbook templates, and cost models.
• Act as the escalation point for production and architecture problems across multiple engineering groups; lead technical response to major incidents alongside SRE.
• Set the technical standard for the platform team: define the bar for review approach, testing depth, instrumentation baseline, and what 'operationally ready' means in practice.
• Mentor two to four Application Platform Engineers, including onboarding new hires into unfamiliar product domains and codebases; grow the technical capabilities of the team.
• Represent platform constraints and capabilities in architecture discussions with engineering leadership; carry group constraints back into Release Engineering and SRE roadmaps.
• Drive structural fixes after major incidents; lead the analysis of root causes and oversee implementation of preventive measures.
• Evaluate and introduce tooling (AI-assisted development, test generation, performance and security tools); prove value before team standardization.
• Design multi-service architectures and reason about failure modes, blast radius, data consistency, and cost before code is written.
• Contribute meaningfully in at least two of Go, Python, Node.js/TypeScript, Java, or .NET; comfortable in a third at short notice.
• Lead capacity and scalability analysis; interpret profiling and tracing data to locate bottlenecks across service boundaries.
• Build internal tooling and automation frameworks that the rest of the platform team depends on, including AI-assisted migration and review workflows.
• Drive security remediation strategy across the software supply chain; manage and prioritize remediation across multiple teams.

Benefits

• Bonus Program
• 401k Retirement
• Medical, Dental, Vision, Basic Life, Short Term Disability and Long-Term Disability Coverage
• Paid Parental Leave
• Support and Community Involvement
• 14 Paid Company Holidays
• Unlimited Paid Time Off for Exempt Employees
• 96 Hours of Sick Time and 120 Hours of Vacation for Non-Exempt Employees Accrued Each Year

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed