Technical Lead, Cloud Platform Engineer

About the role

This role owns the cloud platform that supports critical aviation systems. Decisions directly affect global air traffic operations and emerging aerospace technologies. The position blends architecture, reliability, and team leadership in a safety-critical environment.

Platform and DevOps engineers build the systems that run everything else. They manage infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, observability, and reliability. The work is about automation, scaling, and removing friction for product teams. Systems thinking is the core skill. Platform teams are measured by developer velocity and system reliability. Most companies run on-call rotations, and understanding incident response is part of the role.

Key facts

What you'll do

Reliability is owned end-to-end through failure-focused design, observability built with metrics, logging, and tracing, and incident response led alongside postmortems and continuous improvement initiatives.

Platform ownership extends from design through production operations, ensuring architecture evolves safely.

Requirements

Experience building and operating highly reliable cloud platforms is demonstrated, for example achieving approximately 99.99% uptime. Deep expertise in AWS is shown, with a strong understanding of multi-region and highly available architectures.

Proficiency with Kubernetes and containerized environments is required, along with infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform and Helm. Experience designing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines that support safe, frequent production releases is necessary. Progressive delivery techniques are applied, including canary deployments and safe rollback strategies.

Strong understanding of observability and monitoring systems, for example Grafana and Prometheus, is used to maintain platform health. Small teams are led for 1-2+ years while remaining hands-on with implementation details. Design reviews are led and architectural decisions are made in distributed environments. Experience with FedRAMP High environments or other regulated cloud systems is preferred. Exposure to high-availability systems, for example "four nines" reliability, is a strong plus.

Modern LLM tools are leveraged to accelerate development workflows and enhance code quality. 24/7 production systems are operated and supported effectively to meet aviation demands.

Practical notes

Employment offers are contingent on timely authorization for required US immigration and location restrictions. Work aligns with export-controlled technology and restricted US Government data. Typical interview steps

Platform interviews usually include an infrastructure scenario, a scripting or coding exercise, and operational questions. Candidates may be asked to design a deployment pipeline or debug an outage. Incident experience and an automation mindset are tested. Interviewers often ask about a past outage and how you handled it. Structured post-incident thinking, not heroics, is what they look for.

Good to know

Cloud platform roles combine architecture, operations, and team leadership with strict reliability targets. Infrastructure-as-code, Kubernetes, and observability tools form the daily toolkit. Progressive delivery and incident response practices are common in safety-critical domains. Regulated environments often require compliance experience and security clearances. Team collaboration remains asynchronous and tightly coupled with production systems. Continuous improvement is driven through postmortems and metrics.

Questions to ask

Worth asking in any interview: how the team measures success, who the role works with daily, what the onboarding looks like, and what the company is trying to achieve this year. Asking what past hires did well is a strong final question. Keep the list short and pick the questions that matter most to you.

Career growth

Platform careers grow from engineer to senior, staff, and platform lead roles. Some people move into SRE leadership or cloud architecture. Breadth across networking, storage, and reliability becomes more important at senior levels. Platform careers reward breadth and calm under pressure. Experience automating your own work is the strongest signal for senior roles.