Platform Engineering Lead

The listed salary range serves as a general pay guideline for this position's pay level. Platform Engineering Lead Location: Remote - Anywhere in Canada Reporting the Director, IT Cloud Transformations and Infrastructure the Platform Engineering lead will help to spearhead the strategic development and evolution of our internal development platform (IDP). This pivotal role will establish and champion Platform Engineering principles, treating our developers as customers and empowering them with self-service capabilities to significantly enhance their productivity and the overall delivery velocity of our software products. The position demands a person who understands that the platform is a product, with its success measured by user adoption and satisfaction, enabling developers to focus on core business logic by reducing their cognitive load. You will lead a cross functional team, driving the architectural design, implementation, and continuous improvement of a robust, scalable, and secure platform across multi-cloud environments, specifically Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Our mission - Provide expertise and intelligent solutions to help Canadians navigate life with confidence. # Impactful work - get the opportunity to work on meaningful projects that have a positive impact on our customers, our company, and society as a whole. # Hone your skills - this is an opportunity that allows for you to grow your technical, and functional skills. Platform Leadership: Lead the definition, architecture, and evolution of our internal development platform (IDP) from inception to continuous improvement, ensuring it aligns with organizational strategy and adheres to stringent security best practices. This involves a proactive approach to building a service that enables developers, rather than merely managing infrastructure. Build, lead, and mentor a high-performing cross-functional team, fostering a culture of technical excellence, collaboration, and continuous learning. This includes providing technical guidance, and driving process improvements to optimize team efficiency and output. Platform Engineering Principles & Product Mindset: Champion the adoption of core Platform Engineering principles, including self-service enablement, abstraction of complexity, and a product-centric approach to internal tooling, with a relentless focus on enhancing Developer Experience (DX). Promote, maintain and enhance, automated Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. Implement and enforce GitOps practices using ArgoCD as the declarative continuous deployment tool for Kubernetes, ensuring Git remains the single source of truth for all configurations and enabling automated synchronization and drift detection. Containerization & Orchestration: Lead the adoption, management and optimization of containerization technologies, demonstrating deep expertise in Kubernetes for deploying and managing cloud-native applications, including the implementation of advanced orchestration patterns. Comprehensive Observability: Collaborate with the SRE team to promote, maintain, and manage advanced monitoring, logging, and tracing solutions. This involves strategically adopting OpenTelemetry (oTel) for vendor-neutral, end-to-end telemetry collection and analysis, providing deep insights into platform and application performance. Partner closely with product, architecture, security, and development teams to gather requirements, align on roadmaps, and ensure the platform effectively meets the evolving needs of the organization, fostering a cohesive and collaborative engineering environment. Performance & Cost Optimization: Drive initiatives for platform performance tuning, cost optimization, and scalability, ensuring efficient resource utilization and continuous improvement of platform efficiency across all environments. Experience: 5+ years of progressive experience in software engineering, DevOps, or Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) roles, with at least 2-3 years specifically in a Platform Engineer capacity. Technical Skills Cloud Platforms: Deep hands-on expertise with major public cloud providers, specifically Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), including their core compute, storage, networking, and serverless services. Extensive experience designing, implementing, and optimizing end-to-end CI/CD pipelines. Mastery of GitOps principles and hands-on experience with ArgoCD for declarative Kubernetes deployments, including automated synchronization, rollback, and drift detection. A deep understanding of the "everything-as-code" philosophy is foundational for consistent and auditable deployments. Proven experience implementing comprehensive monitoring, logging, and tracing solutions. Hands-on experience with monitoring tools such as DataDog and a deep understanding of OpenTelemetry (oTel) for vendor-neutral telemetry collection, processing, and analysis. Programming & Scripting: Strong proficiency in at least one modern programming language (e.g., Python, Go, Bash) for automation, tooling development, and API integration. Solid understanding of the broader Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) landscape, microservices architectures, and distributed systems. Security: Strong understanding of cloud security best practices, including Identity and Access Management (IAM), encryption, secret management, and embedding security controls into CI/CD pipelines (DevSecOps) Demonstrated ability to drive change, foster a culture of continuous improvement, and make data-driven decisions, balancing short-term needs with long-term strategic vision. Strong problem-solving abilities, strategic thinking, and a proactive, solution-oriented approach to complex technical challenges. If you are applying for a position which is open to applicants across Canada, unless otherwise indicated in the position, language proficiency in English is required for communicating with customers, advisors, or employees across Canada. For permanent full-time positions, Empire Life offers a comprehensive total rewards package that includes: Competitive salaries with annual pay increases Annual bonus program, which recognizes both strong company performance and individual contributions, for non sales positions A comprehensive employer-funded benefits package starting from day one of employment, that includes life insurance, disability, health and dental and a generous health account Flexible work arrangements and an annual allotment of personal health days. Four weeks annual vacation from hire date A defined contribution pension plan with generous employer matching Top up programs for parental leave and compassionate leave We celebrate diversity, are committed to creating an inclusive environment, and welcome everyone to participate in our application process. Applicants will receive equal consideration without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, or age. Empire Life welcomes applications from people with disabilities and disabled people. Accommodations are available upon request for candidates taking part in all aspects of the screening and selection process.