Platform Lead

WHITEPAGES INC•Seattle, WA

5d•$175,000 - $200,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Whitepages is hiring a Platform Lead to own our production infrastructure and lead a small team mid-level SREs. This is a working lead position: you’ll be hands-on with the systems every day while providing technical direction and mentorship to the team. Kubernetes is the foundation of how we run production, and deep operational expertise with it is non-negotiable. You should know your way around cluster operations, networking, ingress, storage, and troubleshooting at a level that comes from running real workloads. Strong AWS fundamentals are equally important. Beyond that core, the role has real room to grow. We’re a small, profitable company, and the right person will have the opportunity to shape the scope of this position based on what they bring, whether that’s deeper automation, security, developer experience, or something else entirely. We build the role together. Fair warning: you’ll wear a lot of hats. One day you’re debugging a core platform issue, and the next you might be hanging an access point in the office. If that range sounds fun rather than exhausting, keep reading. Why Whitepages? Real scope at a real company. Whitepages is small and profitable. You’ll own the platform, not a slice of it. Genuine mentorship. Your manager brings roughly 30 years of engineering leadership experience and is invested in growing whoever takes this seat—vendor management, people leadership, organizational dynamics, all of it. A path to senior leadership. This role is designed to build the experience that sets you up for bigger things down the road. AI in practice, not just in theory. We’re actively integrating AI into our engineering workflows and further along than most. This is a great place to learn how to lead through that transition. Room to shape the role. Kubernetes expertise is the baseline. Everything else—the scope, how far it reaches—we figure out together based on what you bring. Whitepages is a nimble, empowered team of ~48 with a big impact. Our remote-first, hybrid work model allows flexibility while keeping teams well-connected. Seattle-based employees enjoy a beautifully designed downtown office with all the perks and work from home opportunities. This role requires Tuesdays in office, as well as a designated in office week each quarter.

Requirements

Applicable degree or equivalent experience. We care about what you can do, not where you learned it.
5+ years of progressive experience in infrastructure, SRE, or platform engineering.
Deep hands-on experience operating Kubernetes in production, cluster lifecycle, networking, ingress controllers, storage, debugging. This is the hard requirement.
Strong AWS fundamentals: VPC, IAM, EC2, EKS, S3, CloudWatch, cost management.
Solid Linux systems knowledge and networking fundamentals.
A track record of running and improving production systems in a small-team environment.
Comfort mentoring mid-level engineers and helping them build good habits.
The ability to balance hands-on work with guiding others—you know when to step in and when to let someone learn.
Clear, calm communication, especially under operational pressure.

Nice To Haves

Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi, or similar).
Familiarity with CI/CD pipeline design and GitOps workflows.
Experience integrating AI tools into engineering workflows.
Previous people leadership or tech lead experience (but strong ICs ready to make the jump are encouraged to apply).
Opinions about the NGINX ingress controller deprecation.

Responsibilities

Design, operate, and improve the Kubernetes-based infrastructure behind our products.
Ensure production systems are reliable, secure, observable, and cost-efficient. Own the end-to-end health of the platform.
Lead platform projects: improving deployment pipelines, modernizing systems, automating operations, and reducing technical debt.
Provide clear documentation, reference architectures, and runbooks the team can follow and build on.
Participate in on-call rotation and build strong incident response practices across the team.
Leverage AI-assisted tooling where it adds real value—log analysis, automated runbooks, predictive scaling—while keeping engineering judgment at the center.
Set practical, achievable standards for uptime, monitoring, security, and operational hygiene.
Help the team adopt consistent processes for deployment, alerting, and incident reviews.
Model strong engineering fundamentals: clear commits, thorough documentation, meaningful tests, and real ownership of work.
Ensure monitoring and capacity planning are proactive rather than reactive.
Provide day-to-day technical mentorship, especially where the team lacks senior depth. Guide engineers through problems they haven’t seen before.
Design and code reviews to help the team make solid, predictable choices.
Give clear, timely feedback and help engineers develop stronger instincts and broader skills.
Create clarity around priorities and break down work so the team can progress steadily.
Address performance or teamwork issues early and constructively.
Hire thoughtfully when the time comes, focusing on fundamentals and judgment over keyword matching.
Own AWS budgets and keep cloud spending predictable. Use cost-visibility tooling to identify optimization opportunities.
Evaluate tools and vendors through the lens of long-term value, reliability, and simplicity.
Manage vendor relationships and contracts, ensuring service quality and cost alignment.