Senior Platform Engineer

IMS • Waterloo, ON

4d • CA$100,000 - CA$125,000 • Remote

About The Position

The Senior Platform Engineer is a technical leader responsible for designing, operating, and continuously improving the AWS serverless data platform. This role sits at the intersection of infrastructure, software engineering, and developer experience — owning the reliability and scalability of the platform while actively enabling product and data engineering teams to build and ship confidently.

Requirements

• Deep, hands-on experience with the core AWS serverless stack. Candidate should be able to design pipelines with cost, latency, and failure modes in mind, not just get things working.
• Knowledge of AWS IAM, VPC, and security patterns is equally important.
• Strong Python skills are essential — not just scripting, but writing production-quality, testable, maintainable code. Candidate needs to be credible enough to review Python code written by the teams they support.
• Proficiency in Terraform is a must. Candidate should be building reusable, well-structured IaC modules — not one-off configurations — and comfortable working in a GitOps model with peer-reviewed, pipeline-deployed infrastructure.
• Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines. The key mindset here is thinking about other engineers as your customers, and building tooling that reduces friction and cognitive load.
• Comfortable with CloudWatch, and ideally a third-party observability tool. They should understand SLOs and error budgets beyond the theory — and know how to design alerting that's actually actionable rather than noisy.
• Given the developer enablement focus, this is crucial. Candidate needs to write clear documentation, give useful feedback in code reviews, and explain complex infrastructure decisions to non-platform engineers. Strong written communication matters as much as verbal.
• Practical knowledge of least-privilege IAM, secrets management and how to bake secure defaults into platform tooling so teams don't have to think about it.

Nice To Haves

• Java familiarity is a benefit for legacy pipeline work and cross-language debugging, but doesn't need to be at the same depth.

Responsibilities

• Design and maintain self-service tooling, templates, and scaffolding that allow engineers to provision and deploy serverless resources independently.
• Own and evolve internal developer platform (IDP) capabilities — including CI/CD pipeline templates, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) modules, and reusable Lambda/Step Functions patterns.
• Reduce cognitive overhead for engineers by abstracting platform complexity behind well-documented, opinionated interfaces.
• Partner with engineering teams to gather feedback and continuously improve the developer experience.
• Produce and maintain high-quality technical documentation, runbooks, and architectural decision records (ADRs) for the platform.
• Define and evangelize engineering standards for serverless development, including naming conventions, logging patterns, error handling, and observability.
• Lead or contribute to internal tech talks, workshops, and onboarding programmes to upskill engineers on platform capabilities.
• Act as a trusted technical partner to product and data engineering squads, embedding platform expertise into delivery teams as needed.
• Define clear SLAs and SLOs for platform services and communicate them to consuming teams.
• Triage and resolve platform-related blockers rapidly, prioritizing /unblocking engineers over reactive maintenance work.
• Ensure platform infrastructure adheres to security best practices including least-privilege IAM, encryption at rest and in transit, and secrets management.
• Collaborate with security and compliance stakeholders to maintain audit readiness and address vulnerabilities promptly.
• Embed security considerations into platform tooling so that secure defaults are the path of least resistance for engineers.
• Own and evolve IaC for all platform infrastructure using tools such as Terraform, AWS CDK, or CloudFormation.
• Enforce GitOps and CI/CD best practices across platform delivery, ensuring changes are peer-reviewed, tested, and deployed safely.
• Champion progressive delivery practices — including feature flags, canary deployments, and rollback mechanisms — across the platform.
• Drive a culture of continuous improvement through regular platform reviews, blameless post-mortems, and iterative delivery.
• Measure and report on engineering metrics to demonstrate and drive improvement.
• Contribute to the broader engineering community through internal knowledge sharing, cross-team collaboration, and participation in guild or chapter activities.

Benefits

• Flexible remote working options.
• Flexible holiday scheme (unlimited vacation) to really make the most of your time and well-being.
• 'Work From Anywhere' Policy - work almost anywhere in the world for 30 days per year!
• Employee Assistance Program and an enhanced maternity/paternity package.
• Funded training opportunities.
• Death in Service Protection.
• Retirement Savings & Health Benefits.
• Cycle to Work and Car Maintenance Salary Sacrifice discounts!
• Kudos Hub - a peer-to-peer recognition system, where you can recognize others using points. These points can be collected and redeemed against a huge catalogue of rewards.

What This Job Offers

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