Lead Platform Engineer

About the role

We're building a Platform Engineering function inside our Infrastructure Services organization with architectural and technical leadership at its core. The mission is clear: design, build, and lead the evolution of a platform that makes it easy to build and operate reliable infrastructure and delivery workflows - first for our cloud and network engineering teams, and then for partners across application integrations, data engineering, and technologist business teams.

Responsibilities

• Architect and lead the technical implementation of reusable building blocks and infrastructure automation that make delivery consistent, safe, and fast across the organization.
• Work with leadership on direction, owning the execution and driving adoption: CI/CD golden paths.
• Establish and drive adoption of pipeline design principles and best practices so teams follow proven patterns rather than inventing delivery every sprint; lead the evolution as requirements change.
• Design guardrails that are both powerful and usable (linting, validation, policy checks, secret handling).
• Arcitect and build a Terraform module library that encodes organizational best practices designing module interfaces, setting composition patterns, and ensuring consistency across infrastructure definitions.
• Partner with cloud and network engineers as a technical leader: ensure modules are practical, scalable, and usable, while driving adoption and setting expectations for how platform capabilities scale across teams.
• Lead the technical implementation of AI-enabled workflows working with leadership on strategy: evaluate and integrate Enterprise AI tools (ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, Claude, and emerging agent frameworks) into infrastructure and operational processes, always looking for opportunities to accelerate delivery and eliminate toil.
• Drive thoughtful technical decision-making across the platform by integrating AI-assisted analysis and automation - turning data and insights into better infrastructure decisions.
• Lead the evolution of incident response and operational workflows - using AI and automation to make incident response faster, smarter, and more consistent.
• Pioneer the next evolution of AI-powered infrastructure working with leadership: explore and architect agent-based systems (workflow engines like n8n, agentic AI patterns) for PR generation, intelligent incident handling, and autonomous runbook execution - driving both the technical implementation and organizational readiness for this shift.

Requirements

• Terraform/Terraform Cloud expertise: you have built and shipped real Terraform work at scale, with deep understanding of module architecture, state management patterns, and workflow design - and experience guiding others on these topics.
• Git/GitHub mastery: deep expertise in workflows, branching strategies, code review processes, and CI/CD integration - with experience designing these patterns for teams and platforms.
• Cloud architecture expertise in Azure or AWS (Azure strongly preferred; AWS experience a plus) - including hands-on infrastructure design, service selection, and multi-cloud strategy thinking.
• Software engineering discipline: you write clean, maintainable code and design systems with other engineers in mind - building abstractions, APIs, and tooling that are a pleasure to use (language-flexible; what matters is design sensibility and execution quality).
• AI-forward technical leadership: you actively use AI tools (ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot) as daily multipliers, you have a proven track record of operationalizing AI into engineering workflows, and you see agentic AI patterns as foundational to the next generation of infrastructure automation. You can articulate where AI adds leverage and where it doesn't.
• Datadog (observability patterns, dashboards/monitors as code, integrating telemetry into workflows)
• Ansible
• Networking fundamentals (enough to collaborate effectively with network engineering)
• Kubernetes / Docker (we have some Kubernetes in AWS today)
• Workflow automation platforms (for example: n8n) or interest in agent-style automation

Qualifications

No other builder can offer the collaborative design-build approach that Clayco does. We work on creative, complex, award-winning, high-profile jobs. The pace is fast!

Benefits

• Discretionary Annual Bonus: Subject to company and individual performance
• Comprehensive Benefits Package Including: Medical, dental and vision plans, 401k, generous PTO and paid company holidays, employee assistance program, flexible spending accounts, life insurance, disability coverage, learning & development programs and more!

Pay

The salary range for this position considers a wide range of factors in making compensation decisions including but not limited to: Education, qualifications, skills, training, experience, certifications, internal equity, and location. Compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case.

Schedule

This position is classified as a safety-sensitive role in accordance with applicable state and federal laws. Candidates selected for this position will be subject to a comprehensive background check, which includes mandatory drug testing.