Lead Engineer- Platform Engineering

Lead Platform Engineer Location: Seattle, WA Time Type: Full time Job Requisition ID: B021670 The Foundation We are the largest nonprofit fighting poverty, disease, and inequity around the world. We believe our employees should reflect the rich diversity of the global populations we aim to serve. We provide an exceptional benefits package to employees and their families which include comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage with no premiums, generous paid time off, paid family leave, foundation-paid retirement contribution, regional holidays, and opportunities to engage in several employee communities.

The Team Within Business Operations and the Information Technology (IT) organization, the Enterprise Data Solutions (EDS) team leads work across Knowledge Management, AI, Data Engineering, Business Intelligence, Data Infrastructure, and Health Data Platforms. The team's vision is to empower the Foundation with innovative, data and AI driven services and solutions that enable timely, informed decision-making. As part of this scope, the EDS team recently launched the Enterprise Data Platform (EDP) - the central hub for managing, analyzing, and sharing the Foundation's data assets and enabling AI.

Your Role As a Lead Platform Engineer, you are an experienced, hands-on technical leader responsible for architecting, delivering, and evolving complex technology solutions that support foundation and affiliate staff around the world. You operate with a high degree of independence, serving as a subject matter expert and acting as a practice lead who contributes to technical execution, builds team capability and mentors engineers. In this role, you provide technical leadership across multiple platforms and domains, shape solution strategy, contribute to technical execution and guide engineering excellence across the organization.

You serve as a trusted advisor to IT leadership and business partners, helping translate long-term organizational needs into scalable, secure, sustainable technology capabilities. Your work directly strengthens the foundation's ability to operate effectively and advance its mission globally. What You'll Do Technology & Architecture Leadership Define and evolve multi-year Data and AI platform roadmaps aligned to enterprise architecture, security standards, and business strategies.

Work with business leaders globally to understand business needs, translate requirements to meaningful design artifacts and implement data and AI tooling for Enterprise Data Platform (EDP). Implement Data and AI governance controls, data and platform level security best practices as we continue to build out EDP. Provide platform architectural leadership and hands-on development of frameworks (example: Data Classification, data auditing, etc.) Lead platform tools, frameworks and vendor evaluations, guiding build vs.

Develop and promote engineering standards, reference architectures, and data access design patterns used across IT and partner teams. Anticipate technology impacts across applications, data, integrations, and infrastructure-and guide teams through informed trade-off decisions including assessing new technology. Solution Delivery & Continuous Improvement Develop design patterns for developing and governing data and agentic AI applications on EDP using Databricks foundation models, OpenAI, Claude, Snowflake Cortex etc.

Manage and drive improvements of a lightweight custom application (Data Portal) for self-service data cataloging, search and discovery and data sharing with internal and external users. Day-to-day hands-on execution and implementation of solutions, initiatives, processes and practices. Lead and oversee technical direction for large multi-team delivery efforts, ensuring application of modern engineering and DevSecOps practices through completion.

Conduct architectural and technical reviews of solution designs, code, and delivery approaches to raise quality and consistency. Champion automation, governance, observability, and operational excellence to ensure platforms remain reliable, performant, and cost effective. Translate complex system challenges into actionable plans that improve sustainability, lifecycle health, and user experience.

Provide senior-level input to annual planning, including resource needs, modernization opportunities, risks, and capacity considerations. Leadership, Influence & Collaboration Serve as a practice lead, SME and senior mentor; Build strong, collaborative relationships across IT, Business Operations, and programmatic teams. Lead cross-functional architecture and design discussions, guiding teams through ambiguity with clarity, sound judgment, and tactical planning.

Represent IT in foundation working groups, governance forums, and cross-team initiatives, ensuring alignment with broader strategies and priorities. Lead core initiatives partnering across PSTs, Ops and IT. Your Experience Bachelor's or master's in computer science or related field or equivalent experience. 12+ years' experience in data platforms with a focus on advanced analytics, AI/ML Infrastructure, data security and automation.

Experience in working on data platform architecture, processing of unstructured data and extracting insights. Experience with analyzing and extracting insights from health and life sciences data (internal and external public repositories) using analytical and reporting tools. Experienced in working with business users and co-developing solutions on EDP using Databricks, Azure and governing AI applications.

Azure (Data Lake, Azure ML, Event Hubs, etc.) IaC automating infrastructure provisioning using Terraform Databricks experience is a must (Lakeflow, Spark, Delta Lake, Databricks Applications, Unity Catalog) Snowflake (Iceberg, Horizon catalog, Cortex AI, secure data sharing) Experience designing and building API-driven data platforms (REST/GraphQL, microservices), and API/AI gateways. Experience with data sharing with internal and external users, cataloging external data platforms is preferred. Familiarity with building data pipelines with Databricks and DBT Cloud and orchestration.

Strong understanding of: RAG architectures, embeddings, and vector databases. Document chunking, indexing, and retrieval strategies. Experience with document processing/NLP pipelines (OCR, entity extraction, classification).

Collibra data catalog and Data Governance. Deep expertise with cloud-based infrastructure (Azure preferred), networking, identity, security, automation, and cost optimization. Advanced experience with CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, cloud-native operational models, and modern version control strategies.

Proficiency with programming and scripting languages such as C#.Net, Python, or PowerShell is desirable. Previous experience with Salesforce would be a plus. The Foundation does not provide immigration-related sponsorship for this role.

This includes direct company sponsorship and any work authorization requiring a written submission or other immigration support from the company (eg: H-1B, O-1, L-1, E, OPT, STEM-OPT, CPT, TN, J-1, etc.). The salary range for this role is $190,100 to $294,700 USD. New hires salaries are typically between the range minimum and the salary range midpoint.

Actual placement in the range will depend on a candidate's job-related skills, experience, and expertise, as evaluated during the interview process. If you have a disability or medical condition and need an accommodation at any stage of the application or interview process-such as an ASL interpreter, alternative interview format, or physical accessibility support-we're happy to help. Inclusion Statement We are dedicated to the belief that all lives have equal value.

We strive for a global and cultural workplace that supports ever greater diversity, equity, and inclusion - of voices, ideas, and approaches - and we support this diversity through all our employment practices. All applicants and employees who are drawn to serve our mission will enjoy equality of opportunity and fair treatment without regard to race, color, age, religion, pregnancy, sex, sexual orientation, disability, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, and prior protected activity. Posted by the FREE value-added recruitment advertising agency je-2051d05bb7ab4e34a02f85316bcc5fa6 Employment Type: Full Time