Principal Platform Engineer

Responsibilities

• Define and execute a multi-year Platform Engineering roadmap aligned to Sunflower Bank's business strategy, target-state architecture, risk appetite, merger integration priorities, and IT modernization outcomes.
• Establish and evolve the Internal Developer Platform and shared technology services using a product operating model, with clear service ownership, roadmaps, lifecycle standards, support models, and measurable customer outcomes.
• Define platform capabilities including: Developer self-service, Infrastructure automation, CI/CD services, Security guardrails, Identity integration, Observability, Service onboarding, Runtime platforms.
• Promote a platform-first, reuse-before-build mindset across technology teams to reduce tool sprawl, one-off solutions, and long-term support complexity.
• Measure platform success through a balanced scorecard covering adoption, time to deliver, reliability, security and compliance, unit cost, automation, customer experience, technical debt reduction, and operational efficiency.
• Design and lead the implementation of an enterprise Internal Developer Platform.
• Build reusable platform capabilities that reduce duplication and improve consistency across engineering teams.
• Create policy-governed self-service experiences that allow authorized teams to provision environments, deploy applications, access approved services, and consume infrastructure safely, consistently, and with traceable approvals.
• Drive platform product management practices, including platform roadmaps, adoption strategies, and customer feedback loops.
• Define engineering reference architectures, platform design standards, and technology lifecycle requirements that guide modernization, integration, and decommissioning decisions.
• Establish reusable patterns for hybrid cloud, infrastructure, application delivery, integration, data, identity, resilience, and security services, while reducing unnecessary variation across the enterprise.
• Serve as a senior technical authority on engineering platforms and enterprise-scale systems.
• Ensure solutions meet defined requirements for scalability, recoverability, resiliency, observability, supportability, security, data protection, regulatory compliance, and total cost of ownership.
• Partner with Enterprise Architecture to evolve target-state technology architecture.
• Establish pragmatic Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices across the organization, including service ownership, reliability engineering, capacity management, problem management, and continuous improvement.
• Define Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and Error Budget frameworks.
• Lead an enterprise observability and operational intelligence strategy that consolidates tooling, improves end-to-end service visibility, and includes: Monitoring, Logging, Tracing, Incident management, Operational analytics.
• Drive automation of operational, control, and evidence-collection processes to improve resiliency, accelerate recovery, reduce manual effort, and strengthen audit readiness.
• Provide technical leadership for critical incidents, root-cause remediation, recurring-problem elimination, and systemic platform risks, with clear accountability and transparent executive communication.
• Drive modernization and rationalization of CI/CD capabilities and software delivery pipelines, emphasizing standard services, embedded controls, automated testing, and repeatable release practices.
• Define standards for Infrastructure as Code (IaC), GitOps, platform automation, and release engineering.
• Establish engineering workflows that make the secure, compliant, and supportable path the easiest path, while improving repeatability, evidence quality, and delivery velocity.
• Continuously evaluate emerging technologies and practices that improve engineering effectiveness.
• Eliminate delivery bottlenecks through automation and platform enablement.
• Define, publish, and govern enterprise engineering standards, approved patterns, exception processes, and technology lifecycle expectations, with clear ownership and measurable conformance.
• Partner closely with Information Security, Enterprise Risk, Compliance, and Internal Audit to translate requirements into automated guardrails, preventive controls, continuous monitoring, and reusable evidence.
• Promote technology consistency and architectural alignment across business domains.
• Influence technology direction without direct authority across engineering, infrastructure, security, architecture, and data teams.
• Serve as a trusted advisor to senior technology leadership.
• Facilitate alignment between strategic technology initiatives and platform capabilities.
• Drive adoption of platform services through transparent roadmaps, documentation, enablement, communities of practice, and a collaborative 'do it with me' partnership model.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or equivalent experience.
• 10+ years of progressive software engineering, infrastructure engineering, or platform engineering experience.
• 5+ years leading large-scale engineering initiatives or technical programs.
• Demonstrated experience designing, operating, measuring, and continuously improving enterprise platform services used across multiple technology teams.
• Deep understanding of: Platform Engineering, Developer Experience (DevEx), DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, Cloud Platforms, Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD Automation, Observability.
• Proven ability to influence senior technology and business leaders, build cross-functional alignment, and drive sustained operating-model and organizational change.
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Mut be bondable.