**Our team:**

We are a midsize team of friendly open-source enthusiasts. Outside of coffee chats in Google Meet, we focus on IaC, automation, and continuously improving the platform that serves millions of users. Our team provides the foundational platform layers that power internet-scale applications. Our platform enables our development teams to manage cloud infrastructure, automate critical processes, and ensure the reliability of shared systems like CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes clusters, and central metrics/logging infrastructure.

**About the role:**

As **Team Lead Platform Engineering**, you lead a small, experienced team responsible for building and evolving our internal engineering platform. Your mission is to **enable product teams to deliver faster, safer, and with higher quality** by providing an excellent developer experience and strong, scalable platform foundations. Our platform function already has solid fundamentals and is on a good path toward maturity. In this role, you will **evolve what works, sharpen focus, and raise the bar** — both technically and organizationally. You combine a **clear focus on outcomes and performance** with **servant leadership**. You create an environment where people feel safe, trusted, and empowered — and where expectations, priorities, and quality standards are equally clear.

**What you will be doing:**

**Leadership: Care, Clarity & Performance**

- Lead and grow a centralized Platform Engineering team (currently 4 engineers).
- Create a psychologically safe environment where people can speak up, experiment, and learn.
- Set clear goals, priorities, and expectations, ensuring the team understands what success looks like.
- Hold a high bar for ownership, execution quality, and reliability — with accountability and support.
- Actively remove blockers and distractions so the team can focus on delivering impact.
- Coach team members through regular feedback, fostering both personal growth and strong performance.

**Platform as an Internal Product**

- Own the platform as an internal product with a clear vision, roadmap, and measurable outcomes.
- Engage closely with engineering teams to understand real needs and friction points.
- Prioritize work based on developer productivity, adoption, and organizational impact.
- Balance listening carefully with making clear decisions when trade-offs are required.
- Drive adoption through usability, documentation, and collaboration — not bureaucracy.

**Technical Direction & Engineering Standards**

- Define, communicate, and uphold high engineering standards for the platform team and promote it in the engineering organization.
- Provide technical guidance and challenge design decisions constructively.
- Balance short-term delivery with long-term platform sustainability.

**Stakeholder Management & Alignment**

- Work closely with the other teams in the department, Infrastructure, Security and IT-Operations, to ensure deep and frictionless collaboration as well as with the Head of Digital Enablement, engineering Heads, and engineering Team Leads.
- Translate organizational and business needs into clear platform priorities.
- Confidently push back and say “no” when requests don’t align with platform goals — transparently and respectfully.
- Communicate decisions clearly, including rationale, trade-offs, and expected impact.

## Job requirements

**Leadership & Mindset**

- Proven experience leading engineering teams with a strong focus on outcomes and a servant leadership mindset.
- Ability to combine empathy and trust with clarity, decisiveness, and accountability.
- Strong sense of ownership for both team health and delivered results.
- Comfort operating in evolving environments and guiding teams through change.

**Platform & Cloud Expertise**

- Solid architectural understanding of cloud platforms, especially **AWS**.
- Strong experience with **Kubernetes**, **Terraform** / Infrastructure as Code, **CI/CD** systems
- Technical credibility to guide best practices and challenge assumptions without being the primary implementer.

**Product & Organizational Thinking**

- Deep understanding of platform engineering as an enabler for engineering teams.
- Product-driven mindset: you focus on outcomes, adoption, and value delivered.
- Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills.
- Ability to align engineering excellence with broader company goals.