Senior Platform Engineer

Piper Sandler & Co. • Minneapolis, MN

21h • $140,000 - $200,000

About The Position

At Piper Sandler, we connect capital with opportunity to build a better future. We believe that diverse teams with unique backgrounds, skills and experiences yield more innovative solutions. This is reflected in our commitment to engage, hire, and retain bright, committed people to work in partnership within an inclusive environment that allows each person to achieve personal success and add value to our teams and communities. Piper Sandler is seeking a Senior Platform Engineer in our Minneapolis, MN or New York, NY office. Piper Sandler is expanding its cloud capabilities to support the firm’s growing business and development demands. We are seeking a Senior Platform Engineer who will act as a senior technical resource and subject matter expert for cloud engineering. This individual will provide hands-on technical guidance, architectural expertise, and day-to-day support, ensuring developers adopt secure, scalable, and well-designed cloud solutions. You will play a pivotal role in modernizing our deployment strategy by driving the adoption of GitHub-based GitOps workflows, integrating Orca Security for continuous compliance, and establishing robust observability through Datadog. A primary focus of this role will be building out a comprehensive Service Catalog, creating "paved roads" that allow developers to deploy pre-validated, secure, and observable infrastructure with minimal friction. This role offers the opportunity to shape the future of cloud adoption at Piper Sandler, working in a collaborative, forward-looking engineering team. You will play a critical role in bringing structure and expertise to an emerging Platform Engineering function while engaging directly with developers to enable business success.

Requirements

• Technical Expertise Deep experience in Microsoft Azure (compute, networking, security, governance, identity, monitoring).
• Familiarity with AWS and GCP cloud services.
• Proficiency with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Bicep, ARM, CloudFormation).
• Experience designing and maintaining internal developer platforms (IDP) or service catalogs (e.g., via Backstage, ServiceNow, or Azure Template Specs).
• Proven ability to build "golden images" (using tools like Packer or Azure Image Builder) that pre-package security agents and monitoring configs.
• Experience integrating ITSM tools (specifically ServiceNow) with CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions) to automate change management governance.
• Expertise in configuring Datadog for cloud infrastructure monitoring, APM (Application Performance Monitoring), and log management.
• Strong experience implementing GitOps principles using GitHub (GitHub Actions, GitHub Enterprise).
• Hands-on experience with Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) tools, specifically integrating Orca Security into GitOps workflow
• Strong scripting skills in Python, PowerShell, or Bash.
• Broad knowledge of full stack engineering, with the ability to connect cloud infrastructure, networking, security, data services, and application design patterns.
• Collaboration & Communication Proven ability to influence developer decisions and represent Platform Engineering in a distributed team environment.
• Strong interpersonal skills with the ability to communicate complex tradeoffs to developers and stakeholders.
• Track record of mentoring, knowledge sharing, and building trust across technical teams.
• Mindset & Growth Curiosity and a continuous learning mindset, with a passion for staying current on cloud technologies and applying new ideas.
• Comfort working in an evolving, maturing Platform Engineering organization where adaptability and initiative are critical.

Nice To Haves

• Certifications in Azure, AWS, or GCP.
• Datadog Fundamentals or Advanced certifications.
• Experience with ServiceNow DevOps or Change Management modules.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, containerization (Kubernetes, AKS, ECS, GKE), and DevOps practices.
• Knowledge of compliance requirements (SOX, SOC2, FINRA, etc.).
• Strong technical documentation and presentation skills.

Responsibilities

• Service Catalog & "Paved Road" Engineering Design and build a self-service Service Catalog of "golden images" and infrastructure templates that allow developers to spin up resources quickly and autonomously.
• Ensure all catalog items have "baked-in" security controls (Orca), observability (Datadog), and governance (ServiceNow) by default, removing the burden of configuration from application teams.
• Treat the platform as a product: continuously gather developer feedback to refine catalog offerings, reducing lead time for new project spin-ups.
• Automation, GitOps & Infrastructure as Code Build and maintain automation tools, templates, and frameworks (Terraform, ARM/Bicep, CloudFormation, etc.) to accelerate cloud adoption.
• Design and manage GitOps workflows using GitHub Actions to ensure infrastructure changes are declarative, version-controlled, and automatically reconciled.
• Integrate ServiceNow Change Management directly into GitOps pipelines, ensuring that automated deployments are gated by valid change requests and approvals.
• Integrate Orca Security scanning directly into CI/CD pipelines to detect vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and compliance issues early in the development lifecycle.
• Implement comprehensive observability pipelines using Datadog to ensure all cloud resources are monitored, logged, and traceable from deployment to production.
• Best Practices & Governance Define, document, and evangelize standards for cloud networking, identity, automation, and security.
• Establish governance policies where Orca Security findings trigger automated gates to block deployments that do not meet risk acceptance criteria.
• Automate the creation and closure of ServiceNow change tickets within the deployment pipeline to reduce manual overhead while maintaining auditability.
• Enforce "secure by design" principles by ensuring that only approved, hardened images and modules from the Service Catalog are used in production environments.
• Ensure all cloud deployments align with enterprise security controls, compliance frameworks, and regulatory requirements.
• Developer Engagement & Support Act as a visible and accessible point of contact for walk-ups, ad-hoc design sessions, and day-to-day developer questions.
• Bridge Platform Engineering and Development teams, ensuring consistent alignment on cloud patterns, standards, and operational readiness.
• Mentorship & Knowledge Sharing Demonstrate technical depth and professional maturity by mentoring junior engineers and coaching developers on cloud adoption, secure GitOps methodologies, DevOps practices, and modern engineering approaches.
• Foster a culture of curiosity and continuous learning, staying current with evolving cloud technologies and sharing insights across teams.

Benefits

• Piper Sandler values a strong culture dedicated to the emotional and physical well-being of our employees.
• Learn more about our commitment to our employee’s health, well-being, our benefits program and how we are here for our employees and their families today, tomorrow and beyond here .

What This Job Offers

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