Infrastructure Engineering Group Lead

Description What are we looking for? We are seeking a Platform Engineering Group Lead to strengthen our platform and operational engineering capabilities and ensure the company has a secure, reliable, and scalable foundation for product delivery and operations. This role drives execution, raises engineering standards, and improves consistency across deployment, infrastructure, and operational practices in support of product delivery, customer environments, and internal platforms. The role partners closely with R&D, QA, IT stakeholders, and PS/CS to enable consistent deployments through standards, reference architectures, and high-quality installation documentation. Your key responsibilities will be: Lead the Platform Engineering group, including people leadership, prioritization, execution management, and cross-functional coordination, and establish an effective operating cadence for a small, high-impact organization. Build scalable operating models, ownership boundaries, and execution discipline across platform, deployment, and operational engineering activities. Drive automation and deployment engineering outcomes across CI/CD, release readiness, environment provisioning, and delivery tooling, with a strong focus on reducing manual steps and operational risk. Own deployment readiness across internal and customer-facing environments, including staging deployments, validation steps, installation packages, and deployment runbooks, to support consistent and repeatable implementations. Ensure effective internal infrastructure and workplace technology operations, including service levels, escalation paths, operational hygiene, endpoint lifecycle, backups, and core office/server-room infrastructure. Drive security and compliance readiness within the group’s scope, including operational controls implementation, remediation tracking, evidence discipline, and coordination with external cybersecurity partners and internal security stakeholders. Establish engineering standards and technical guardrails across infrastructure-as-code, change management, observability, access controls, and backup/restore verification. Lead incident management across platform, infrastructure, and internal technology services, including issue assessment, prioritization, escalation, incident reviews, and corrective actions to improve reliability over time. Define and improve deployment patterns, reference architectures, and environment recommendations based on customer constraints and operational requirements to support successful PS/CS engagements. Professional Qualifications: 5+ years of experience in Platform Engineering, Infrastructure, or DevOps roles with end-to-end ownership of delivery and operations, including deployment, upgrade, rollback, monitoring, and troubleshooting. 3+ years of proven direct management experience leading teams of 5+ people, including hiring, coaching, performance management, and prioritization under pressure. Experience leading through senior individual contributors and technical stakeholders in a small or mid-sized organization, with clear ownership, aligned priorities, and effective execution. Demonstrated ability to lead broad platform and operational engineering scopes with clear priorities and predictable execution. Strong architecture and systems design capability, including standardization, technical tradeoff analysis, operability, reliability, and security considerations. Strong Kubernetes experience in real operational environments, including deployments, upgrades, troubleshooting, networking, and storage. Strong CI/CD and release engineering experience, including reliable pipeline design, artifact and version management, quality gates, and consistent delivery outcomes through automation and standards. Strong Infrastructure-as-Code and automation experience (Terraform, scripting in Python/shell). Experience with observability and operational telemetry platforms, including Elastic-based environments, is an advantage. Strong understanding of Linux and networking fundamentals, backed by hands-on experience with DNS, TLS/certificates, routing, and firewalls. Experience driving security and compliance execution in operational environments, including controls implementation, remediation workflows, and audit-ready evidence discipline. Personal Skills: High emotional intelligence and strong interpersonal skills. Builds trust across R&D, QA, IT, and customer-facing stakeholders. Collaborative leadership style. Builds alignment and trust across technical and operational stakeholders while raising execution standards. Strong ownership mindset with a hands-on, can-do approach. Drives problems to closure and removes blockers. Excellent judgment under pressure. Remains calm, structured, and effective during incidents. Strong communication skills. Able to translate technical tradeoffs into clear decisions, priorities, and actions. Pragmatic and outcomes-driven. Balances short-term delivery with long-term platform health. Strong coaching mindset. Raises standards while enabling the team to move fast.