Lead Platform Engineer

DTN • Dallas, TX

3d

About The Position

DTN is seeking a technically accomplished Lead Platform Engineer to design, build, operate, and evolve foundational capabilities of its internal Operational Decisioning Platform (ODP). The platform packages cloud infrastructure into higher-level capabilities so engineers, solutions teams, and customers can build data products, applications, and AI-powered tools without managing underlying cloud infrastructure. The role owns complex platform components end-to-end, including developer-facing APIs, SDKs, CLIs, module frameworks, and managed cloud services. It involves designing greenfield capabilities as well as evolving existing systems, with a focus on distributed systems, secure cross-account communication, multi-tenant isolation, and developer productivity.

This is a deeply technical leadership position responsible for technical direction, architecture, engineering standards, and mentoring. The Lead Platform Engineer partners with Enterprise Architecture and cross-functional teams to build scalable, secure, reliable, and maintainable systems. Responsibilities include cloud-native AWS engineering, security-critical platform design, reusable developer interfaces, operational reliability, and integration of AI capabilities. The role participates in on-call rotations and uses AI-assisted development tools to improve engineering effectiveness. DTN describes a path toward Staff- or Principal-level technical leadership as the platform grows.

DTN is a global data and technology company serving operational leaders in energy, agriculture, and weather-driven industries. It has more than 1,200 employees globally. The targeted base pay range is $132,000–$175,000, with possible performance-based compensation and benefits. Remote work availability is position-dependent.

Requirements

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production distributed systems.
• Demonstrated ability to own complex software components and systems throughout their lifecycle.
• Ability to lead technical initiatives, establish engineering direction, and make sound architectural decisions.
• Experience mentoring engineers through technical design guidance, code reviews, and collaborative development.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent professional experience.
• Deep expertise in AWS cloud-native architecture, including identity and access management, serverless compute, API layers, managed data stores, event-driven services, and cloud security primitives.
• Strong understanding of distributed-systems fundamentals, including idempotency, at-least-once delivery, eventual consistency, retries, backoff strategies, and failure-mode analysis.
• Experience designing, developing, and operating secure, reliable, and scalable distributed applications.
• Hands-on experience with Terraform infrastructure as code.
• Strong software build, testing, and deployment discipline, including continuous integration and automated testing.
• Applied security engineering experience with authenticated service-to-service communication, including technologies such as mTLS.
• Experience with cryptographic signing and verification, identity management, replay protection, and least-privilege access design.
• Ability to reason through complex security requirements, distributed-system failure scenarios, and multi-tenant isolation risks.
• Proficiency in TypeScript/Node.js or demonstrated ability to become productive with these technologies quickly.
• Academic or professional software development exposure to front-end technologies such as React, Angular, or Vue.
• Academic or professional software development exposure to back-end technologies such as Node.js or Python.
• Academic or professional experience with SQL and database technologies such as PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, or equivalent platforms.
• Expert-level experience developing APIs using RESTful services built with Node.js.
• Expert-level experience consuming REST and GraphQL APIs.
• Journeyman-level knowledge of source control and versioning using Git.
• Hands-on experience using modern AI-assisted development tools, including coding assistants and agentic tooling, to improve engineering productivity.
• Hands-on experience designing and building AI-augmented platform capabilities, including LLM and AI-agent integrations and managed AI services.
• Ability to incorporate AI-enabled functionality into modular, reusable platform components.
• Strong technical problem-solving skills and ability to evaluate complex architectural alternatives.
• Ability to independently guide complex engineering work from design through production operation.
• Ability to communicate technical direction, provide constructive engineering feedback, and mentor other engineers.
• Commitment to building secure, reliable, observable, and reusable engineering solutions.

Nice To Haves

• Experience building multi-tenant SaaS platforms, cross-account control planes, or internal developer platforms and SDKs.
• Experience designing APIs and SDKs for other engineers, with attention to developer ergonomics, consistency, and usability.
• Familiarity with observability technologies such as OpenTelemetry.
• Experience with schema-driven interface validation.
• Awareness of multi-cloud architectures and technologies.
• Experience developing platform components using TypeScript/Node.js, Python, containers, Terraform, and modern AWS cloud-native services.
• Experience building secure cross-account infrastructure and developer-facing abstractions in greenfield platform environments.
• Familiarity with module frameworks that manage authenticated dispatch, signing, validation, metrics, and reconciliation.
• Experience applying trunk-based development, ADR-driven design, immutable or pinned releases, least-privilege access, and schema-validated interfaces.
• Background in operational or data-intensive industries such as energy, logistics, weather, or agriculture.

Responsibilities

• Lead the technical design, implementation, delivery, operation, and ongoing evolution of complex platform capabilities.
• Define engineering problems, evaluate architectural alternatives and tradeoffs, and propose scalable, secure, maintainable solutions.
• Partner with Enterprise Architecture to design and implement foundational platform capabilities.
• Own complex components end-to-end, from developer-facing interfaces to the underlying cross-account cloud infrastructure.
• Design, develop, and maintain developer-facing APIs, SDKs, CLIs, module frameworks, and managed platform services.
• Build reusable abstractions that let engineering teams develop data products, applications, and AI-powered solutions without managing cloud infrastructure directly.
• Lead development of greenfield platform capabilities and maintain and evolve existing systems.
• Establish architectural patterns and technical approaches that support scalability, reliability, security, and developer productivity.
• Design and build secure distributed systems across isolated AWS accounts and multi-tenant environments.
• Develop secure cross-account communication mechanisms and infrastructure supporting multi-tenant isolation.
• Design and implement provisioning and lifecycle automation for cloud-based platform capabilities.
• Build asynchronous and event-driven processing, including reliable message handling, retries, backoff strategies, and idempotent operations.
• Develop service discovery, reconciliation, and health-monitoring capabilities.
• Apply distributed-systems principles such as at-least-once delivery, eventual consistency, failure-mode analysis, and resilient service interactions.
• Evaluate communication failures, service interruptions, and isolation-boundary risks and design safeguards.
• Develop cloud-native solutions using AWS identity and access management, serverless compute, API services, managed data stores, event-driven services, and cloud security primitives.
• Build and maintain infrastructure using Terraform and infrastructure-as-code practices.
• Own the design and implementation of security-critical platform components and communication paths.
• Design and harden authenticated service-to-service communication, including technologies such as mTLS.
• Implement cryptographic signing, signature verification, and replay protection.
• Design and maintain secure identity and access management patterns across cloud accounts and services.
• Apply least-privilege access and secure multi-tenant isolation practices; analyze security failure modes and potential isolation breaches.
• Integrate security requirements into platform architecture, interfaces, infrastructure, and operational practices.
• Lead development and evolution of SDKs, APIs, CLIs, and the shared module framework.
• Define and implement interface contracts, data contracts, and consistent integration patterns.
• Develop framework functionality for authentication, authenticated dispatch, validation, metrics, retries, and reconciliation.
• Translate repeated engineering requirements into reusable, standardized platform components and design productive, consistent developer interfaces.
• Support schema-driven interface definitions and validation.
• Establish technical direction, architectural standards, and engineering best practices.
• Author and review technical designs and architecture decision records (ADRs).
• Define and maintain interface standards, data contracts, testing expectations, infrastructure-as-code practices, and observability requirements.
• Provide technical leadership through architecture discussions, design reviews, code reviews, and collaborative problem-solving.
• Mentor mid-level and earlier-career engineers through feedback, pairing, and hands-on guidance.
• Improve engineering quality and processes by sharing expertise and strengthening development practices and platform architecture.
• Own operational reliability and production health of assigned platform components and services.
• Instrument platform services with metrics, logging, tracing, and observability capabilities.
• Define and support service-level objectives (SLOs) and operational reliability expectations.
• Participate in on-call rotations, investigate production incidents, troubleshoot complex failures, and implement improvements that reduce recurring incidents and operational toil.
• Maintain disciplined build, test, and deployment practices, including continuous integration, automated testing, and reliable releases.
• Apply trunk-based development, infrastructure as code, immutable and pinned releases, least-privilege access, and schema-validated interfaces.
• Continuously improve system resilience, debuggability, operational efficiency, and production stability.
• Use AI-assisted development tools, including coding assistants and agentic development technologies, to improve engineering effectiveness and productivity.
• Design and build AI-augmented capabilities within modular platform components; integrate LLMs, AI agents, and managed AI services.
• Evaluate and implement AI technologies that expand the functionality and value of DTN's Operational Decisioning Platform.

Benefits

• Unlimited PTO
• Flexible working hours
• Remote work model (position dependent)
• Competitive medical, dental, and vision insurance plans
• 6% 401K matching
• Unlimited access to 13k+ courses via a learning platform to support employee career advancement
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
• Potential eligibility for market-competitive variable pay and benefits

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior