Position Summary The Senior Platform Services Engineer owns the shared platform foundation digital products are built on: authentication and authorization for both internal and external users, observability (OpenTelemetry), and the common service and API contracts that keep delivery consistent and safe.
This is a hands-on, foundational role – standing up the authentication layer, observability, core shared services, and delivery guardrails. A core part of the job is converting senior engineering judgment into paved paths and automated guardrails (CI/CD, contracts, standards, and AI-assisted review), so that as the team grows, contributors can deliver production-grade work reliably and with less manual oversight.
The charter is deliberately tight at launch – authentication, observability, core shared services, and delivery guardrails. The incumbent is expected to triage incoming requests and defer non-core works, so the platform serves product teams rather than becoming a bottleneck.
The incumbent works free from daily oversight, regularly exercising independent discretion and significant decision-making in completing job duties.
Key Responsibilities
Design, build, and own the shared authentication and authorization layer, serving both internal (employee) and external (customer/partner) users.
Own observability as a shared capability: OpenTelemetry instrumentation, distributed tracing, metrics, and logging, along with the standards product teams follow.
Build and productize common platform services and API/BFF contracts consumed across product teams – self-service, documented, and versioned – treating engineering teams as customers.
Establish CI/CD pipelines, paved-path templates, and automated quality guardrails (type safety, linting, testing, security scanning, and AI-assisted code review) that led distributed teams ship safely.
Define and maintain integration contracts to existing and legacy enterprise systems of record, abstracting their complexity away from product teams.
Provide technical leadership, architecture guidance, and code review as headcount increases, aligning contributions to the platform and its shared standards.
Partner with the Product & Experience Lead on feasibility and the front-end platform / design-system infrastructure.
Set technical standards and mentor engineers over time, raising the team's overall quality floor.
Keep the platform charter tight: triage incoming requests and explicitly sequence or defer work beyond the core v1 (auth, observability, shared contracts, guardrails).
Perform other platform/engineering tasks as assigned.
Qualifications Required Qualifications
Minimum 5 years' experience in software engineering, with significant time in platform, infrastructure, or backend/services roles.
Deep, hands-on expertise in authentication and authorization — OAuth2 / OIDC, SSO, token and session models (e.g., Cognito, Okta, or Auth0) — including serving both internal and external users.
Hands-on experience implementing OpenTelemetry / observability (tracing, metrics, logging) and establishing it as a shared standard.
Proven experience designing and operating shared services, platform-as-a-product, or API/BFF contracts consumed by multiple teams.
Strong CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, and cloud experience (AWS and/or Azure), including automated quality and security gates.
Track record of setting technical standards, reviewing others' code, and mentoring engineers.
Excellent written communication and the discipline for asynchronous work with distributed teams.
Proficient in English communication (verbal and written).
Preferred Qualifications
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, MIS, IT, or a related field.