Platform Engineering Lead

DNAstack

18h • $165,000 - $185,000 • Remote

About The Position

DNAstack is hiring a Platform Engineering Lead to set the direction for the team responsible for the infrastructure its engineers and customers depend on, including GCP and AWS environments, Kubernetes, Terraform and Helm, CI/CD, security, and related tooling. This is a player-coach role: the lead manages and develops the team while remaining hands-on through architecture, code reviews, and implementation.

The lead owns team growth and priorities, plans the platform roadmap with Product, and establishes the platform’s technical direction. The role also covers developer productivity, infrastructure cost management, reliability, and the technical aspects of SOC 2 controls. The position works across engineering, Product, Program Management, company leadership, and security stakeholders.

DNAstack builds software and standards for responsible biomedical data sharing, discovery, and analysis. Its platform supports research and clinical networks working in areas including rare disease, cancer, and infectious disease. The role is remote-friendly, with the option to work in person from the Toronto office, and candidates must be eligible to work in Canada.

Requirements

• At least 8 years of experience in DevOps, site reliability, or platform engineering, including at least 3 years managing engineers.
• Experience setting technical direction and priorities for a platform or infrastructure team and managing senior engineers.
• Production experience with Kubernetes, Terraform, and a CI system on GCP or AWS, with the hands-on ability to review and contribute to this work.
• Direct accountability for a cloud budget, with examples of delivered cost reductions and how they were measured.
• Experience improving developer productivity, supported by metrics.
• A track record of automating repetitive operational work to give a small team leverage.
• Experience with SOC 2 or a comparable control framework, and comfort working with health or genomic data subject to strict, audited access rules.
• Strong communication skills, including explaining technical trade-offs and costs to non-technical leaders, and comfort working across global time zones.
• Eligibility to work in Canada.

Nice To Haves

• Concourse CI experience; DNAstack notes that its tooling is largely custom, so this is a head start rather than a requirement.
• Experience running many environments from one platform.
• Experience using AI and automation to multiply output, including guardrails for agent access.
• Experience building cost allocation or showback models, or internal developer platforms.
• Familiarity with Java services built on Spring Boot, GA4GH standards, or WDL workflow engines.

Responsibilities

• Manage and grow the team through one-on-ones, career conversations, growth plans, performance reviews, and hiring.
• Own team rituals, including planning, retrospectives, and incident reviews.
• Build shared ownership through primary and secondary owners, pairing, shared on-call, and written decisions.
• Coach senior engineers and foster individual empowerment, accountability, and collaboration.
• Maintain a visible, ranked list of priorities; triage requests from Product, Program Management, and customers, and decide what to defer or stop.
• Plan the platform roadmap with Product, covering reliability, security, tooling, and customer environments alongside product features.
• Report progress, risks, and spend to the VP of Product Development and leadership team.
• Set the platform’s technical direction and establish how technical decisions are made, documented, and revisited.
• Guide architecture and contribute hands-on through design reviews, code reviews, and implementation.
• Resolve technical trade-offs across teams and review major changes, including new customer deployments, for cost and risk.
• Define delivery measures, including deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, time to restore, and build and test durations, and act on the results.
• Set direction for the commit-to-production path, including CI, preview environments with representative genomic test data, safe deployments, progressive rollouts, and automated rollback.
• Use AI and deterministic automation to increase team leverage, with guardrails for agent access and KPIs tracking time saved.
• Own tooling, access, licensing, and budget for the platform supporting AI-assisted development.
• Manage the infrastructure budget across GCP, AWS, and related tooling; forecast spending, track it against plan, and explain variances.
• Build cost visibility by environment, customer, and product; set cost targets and manage vendor and licensing relationships, planning renewals ahead of time.
• Own platform reliability, including service level objectives for customer-facing environments, on-call rotation, deployments, alerts, support requests, incident response, and blameless reviews.
• Partner with the Chief Information Officer and Chief Privacy and Security Officer on SOC 2 controls tracked in Drata; own the technical aspects, including access, secrets, CI, and audit evidence.

Benefits

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage for the employee and dependents.
• Three weeks of vacation.
• Unlimited sick days.
• Maternity and parental leave top-up programs.
• One-time remote office set-up stipend.
• Career development and learning support.
• Opportunity to participate in DNAstack’s Employee Stock Option Program.
• Flexible hours and remote-friendly work, with the opportunity to work on-site at the Toronto office.
• Competitive salary.

What This Job Offers

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