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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Lead Systems Platform Engineer

💰 $ - $

EngineeringPlatformSRECloud

🎯 Role Definition

The Lead Systems Platform Engineer is a senior engineering leader who owns the design, delivery, and operational excellence of the platform that enables product and engineering teams to ship software safely and quickly. This role blends deep systems engineering (Linux, networking, container orchestration) with cloud-native infrastructure (AWS/GCP/Azure), platform automation (Terraform, Helm, GitOps), observability (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK), security and compliance, incident management, and people leadership. The Lead Systems Platform Engineer partners with SRE, DevOps, security, and product engineering to define platform strategy, reduce toil through automation, and ensure cost-effective, resilient infrastructure across on-prem and cloud environments.

Keywords: Lead Systems Platform Engineer, Platform Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering, Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD, Observability, Cloud Infrastructure, Automation, Reliability, Scalability, DevOps.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Systems Engineer (Cloud / Linux)
  • Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
  • Senior Platform Engineer / DevOps Engineer

Advancement To:

  • Principal Platform Engineer / Distinguished Engineer
  • Director of Platform Engineering / Head of Infrastructure
  • VP of Engineering (Infrastructure / Reliability)

Lateral Moves:

  • Cloud Architect / Solutions Architect
  • Security Engineering Lead (Cloud Security)
  • Technical Program Manager (Infrastructure)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Lead the end-to-end platform architecture, including design, implementation, and continuous improvement of cloud-native infrastructure (Kubernetes, container runtime, service mesh) to support scalable microservices and monoliths across multiple environments.
  • Own platform availability and reliability SLAs/SLOs by defining and enforcing error budgets, implementing automation for self-healing systems, and driving post-incident analysis and corrective action plans.
  • Architect and maintain infrastructure-as-code (IaC) at scale using Terraform, Pulumi, or CloudFormation; design reusable modules, enforce best practices, and manage multi-account/multi-project deployments securely.
  • Build and operate GitOps/CI-CD pipelines (ArgoCD, Flux, Jenkins, GitLab CI) that deliver consistent, auditable, and fast deployments for multiple engineering teams and environments.
  • Design and implement Kubernetes platform standards (cluster lifecycle, networking, RBAC, quotas, multi-cluster strategies) to reduce fragmentation and accelerate developer productivity.
  • Lead platform observability strategy: implement metrics, distributed tracing, structured logging, and alerting (Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger, ELK/Opensearch) to provide actionable insights and reduce MTTx.
  • Drive cost optimization and cloud governance through tagging strategies, rightsizing, reserved/spot instances, and automated policies for spending visibility and control.
  • Implement and operationalize security controls and compliance requirements across the platform: secrets management (Vault), vulnerability scanning, workload isolation, IAM least privilege, and audit logging.
  • Create and maintain runbooks, playbooks, and incident response procedures; lead on-call rotation improvements and mentor teams in incident detection, triage, and RCA practices.
  • Design and execute a capacity planning and performance testing program to validate scalability assumptions and proactively resolve bottlenecks before they impact customers.
  • Automate repetitive operations tasks and lifecycle management (backup, restore, upgrades, certificate rotation) to minimize manual intervention and reduce operational risk.
  • Drive platform onboarding and developer enablement: templates, CLI tools, developer portals, self-service catalogs, and documentation that shorten time-to-value for engineering teams.
  • Champion cross-team collaboration with product engineering, security, networking, and data teams to align platform roadmaps with business priorities and technical constraints.
  • Evaluate, pilot, and integrate third-party platform tooling and managed services, producing ROI analyses and migration plans that balance velocity and operational burden.
  • Define observability, deployment, and platform-related engineering standards and enforce them through tooling, policy-as-code, and platform guardrails.
  • Mentor and grow a high-performing platform engineering team: recruit, coach, conduct performance reviews, and establish career development plans.
  • Manage major infrastructure projects and migrations (e.g., lift-and-shift to cloud, Kubernetes adoption, multi-region rollout) from planning through cutover and stabilization.
  • Establish metrics and dashboards to measure platform health, reliability, deployment frequency, lead time for changes, and operational overhead; report regularly to execs and stakeholders.
  • Coordinate disaster recovery, business continuity, and multi-region failover strategies, including regular DR tests and runbook validation.
  • Ensure high standards for observability and security by integrating compliance scans, vulnerability remediation workflows, and secure CI/CD gates into the delivery lifecycle.
  • Lead technical design reviews and architecture decisions for platform-dependent projects; enforce consistent, cost-aware, and secure patterns across project implementations.
  • Facilitate vendor and cloud provider relationships, negotiate support and pricing, and maintain an inventory of critical platform dependencies and SLAs.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Produce internal developer-facing documentation, tutorials, and example repos demonstrating platform best practices.
  • Run regular platform health reviews and propose continuous improvement initiatives based on telemetry and team feedback.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Kubernetes (cluster design, multi-cluster strategies, operators, RBAC, admission controllers) — proven experience designing and operating production clusters.
  • Cloud platforms: deep hands-on with AWS, GCP, or Azure (EC2/GKE/EKS/AKS, networking, IAM, managed services).
  • Infrastructure-as-Code: Terraform, Pulumi, or CloudFormation with module design, state management, and CI integration.
  • Configuration management & automation: Ansible, Chef, or Puppet for system configuration and release automation.
  • Container tooling and image pipelines: Docker, image signing/scanning, registries, and container runtime troubleshooting.
  • CI/CD / GitOps: Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD or Flux for automated delivery and promotion pipelines.
  • Observability and monitoring: Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, ELK/Opensearch, and related alerting/notification patterns.
  • Scripting and programming: Python, Go, Bash, or similar for automation, tooling, and debugging.
  • Networking & security: TCP/IP, load balancing, service meshes (Istio/Linkerd/Consul), VPNs, firewalls, and application-layer security fundamentals.
  • Secrets and identity management: HashiCorp Vault, cloud KMS solutions, and secure secret injection patterns.
  • Logging and tracing: centralized logging architectures and distributed tracing practices for root cause analysis.
  • Performance tuning & capacity planning: load testing frameworks, profiling, and bottleneck analysis.
  • Database and storage operations: understanding of managed and self-hosted databases, object/object storage, backup/restore strategies.
  • Policy-as-code & governance tools: Open Policy Agent (OPA), Sentinel, or native cloud policy frameworks.
  • Familiarity with compliance frameworks: SOC2, ISO27001, PCI, HIPAA (where applicable) and translating controls into platform implementations.

Soft Skills

  • Leadership: ability to inspire engineers, set technical vision, and lead cross-functional initiatives.
  • Communication: translate complex technical tradeoffs into business-impactful decisions and communicate clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
  • Coaching & mentoring: develop engineers through feedback, career planning, and hands-on coaching.
  • Stakeholder management: prioritize competing requests, negotiate timelines, and align roadmaps with product goals.
  • Problem solving: analytical thinker who can drive root-cause investigations and long-term fixes rather than band-aid solutions.
  • Strategic planning: balance near-term operational needs with a multi-quarter platform roadmap and technical debt reduction.
  • Empathy and collaboration: build trust with product and infrastructure teams and promote a culture of reliability and shared ownership.
  • Time and project management: run complex projects with cross-team dependencies and deliver on time.
  • Resilience and calm under pressure: lead effective incident response and post-incident learning.
  • Documentation and enablement: create clear runbooks, onboarding guides, and internal reference material.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical discipline or relevant professional certifications (CKA, AWS/GCP/Azure Professional certs).

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Electrical / Computer Engineering
  • Systems Engineering
  • Information Technology / Information Systems

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 7–12+ years of progressive systems, cloud, or SRE/platform engineering experience.

Preferred:

  • 10+ years of infrastructure or platform engineering experience with 3+ years in a lead or technical lead capacity.
  • Demonstrated track record of shipping and operating distributed systems in production, running Kubernetes at scale, building IaC modules, and leading multi-team initiatives.
  • Experience with cloud migrations, hybrid or multi-cloud operations, and implementing enterprise-level security and compliance controls.

Recommended certifications (helpful but not required): Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), HashiCorp Terraform Associate, AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional / Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect / Microsoft Azure Expert, and relevant security certifications (e.g., CISSP, CompTIA Security+).

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