Lead Platform Engineer
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation2 months ago
Base Salary
$190k - $295k/yr
Responsibilities
- Define and evolve multi-year data and AI platform roadmaps aligned with enterprise architecture, security standards, and business strategy.
- Translate global business needs into designs and implement data and AI tooling for the Enterprise Data Platform.
- Implement data and platform governance, security controls, classification, auditing, and access patterns.
- Provide architectural leadership and hands-on development for scalable, secure, resilient, and maintainable platform frameworks.
- Lead platform tool, framework, vendor, and build-versus-buy evaluations.
- Develop engineering standards, reference architectures, and data access design patterns.
- Design and govern data and agentic AI applications using Databricks, OpenAI, Claude, and Snowflake Cortex.
- Manage improvements to the custom Data Portal for data cataloging, search, discovery, and sharing.
- Lead technical direction for multi-team delivery efforts and apply engineering and DevSecOps practices.
- Conduct architecture, design, code, and delivery reviews while improving automation, observability, governance, reliability, performance, and cost effectiveness.
- Partner with service managers and product owners on service strategies, roadmaps, investments, planning, modernization, and capacity.
- Serve as a practice lead and subject matter expert, mentor engineers and contingent staff, manage service partners, and represent IT in governance and cross-functional forums.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science or a related field, or equivalent experience.
- 12+ years of experience with data platforms focused on advanced analytics, AI/ML infrastructure, data security, and automation.
- Experience implementing managed and custom MCP servers, architecting data platforms, and processing unstructured data.
- Experience analyzing health and life sciences data using analytical and reporting tools.
- Experience co-developing solutions on an Enterprise Data Platform using Databricks and Azure and governing AI applications.
- Hands-on experience with Azure services, Terraform, Databricks, Lakeflow, Spark, Delta Lake, Databricks Applications, Unity Catalog, Snowflake, Iceberg, Horizon Catalog, Cortex AI, and secure data sharing.
- Experience designing API-driven data platforms, REST or GraphQL APIs, microservices, and API or AI gateways.
- Experience or familiarity with data sharing, external data cataloging, Databricks and dbt Cloud pipelines, orchestration, Docker, Kubernetes, and distributed systems.
- Strong understanding of RAG architectures, embeddings, vector databases, document chunking, indexing, retrieval, OCR, entity extraction, classification, Collibra, and data governance.
- Deep expertise in cloud infrastructure, networking, identity, security, automation, cost optimization, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, cloud-native operations, and version control.
- Programming or scripting proficiency in C#/.NET, Python, or PowerShell is desirable.
- Previous Salesforce experience is a plus.
- Strong communication, influencing, mentoring, and cross-functional collaboration skills.
Benefits
- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage with no premiums.
- Generous paid time off, paid family leave, foundation-paid retirement contribution, and regional holidays.
- Opportunities to participate in employee communities and an inclusive, accessible workplace.
- The role is located in Seattle or Washington, D.C., with a location-specific salary range for those offices.
- Employment is contingent upon successful completion of a background check.
Tech Stack
Categories
Data EngineeringDevOps