Lead Platform Engineer

Gates Foundation•Seattle, WA

About The Position

The Foundation is the largest nonprofit fighting 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, we’re committed to creating an environment for you to thrive both personally and professionally. The Team Within Business Operations and the Information Technology (IT) organization, the Enterprise Data Solutions (EDS) team leads work across Knowledge Management, AI, Data Engineering, Business Intelligence, Data Infrastructure, and Health Data Platforms. The team’s vision is to empower the Foundation with innovative, data and AI driven services and solutions that enable timely, informed decision-making. As part of this scope, the EDS team recently launched the Enterprise Data Platform (EDP) - the central hub for managing, analyzing, and sharing the Foundation’s data assets and enabling AI. 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 outcomes—not 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 foundation’s ability to operate effectively and advance its mission globally.

Requirements

Bachelor’s or master’s 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.
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 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.).
As part of our standard hiring process for new employees, employment will be contingent upon successful completion of a background check.

Responsibilities

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 infrastructure—and guide teams through informed trade-off decisions including assessing new technology.
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.
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.
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.