Job Description:DTN is seeking an experienced, technically accomplished
Lead Platform Engineer to help design, build, and evolve the foundational capabilities of our Operational Decisioning Platform (ODP).
The DTN Operational Decisioning Platform is an internal platform that packages cloud infrastructure into purpose-built, higher-level capabilities, enabling our engineers, solutions teams, and customers to build data products, applications, and AI-powered tools without managing the underlying cloud infrastructure themselves.
As a Lead Platform Engineer, you will be directly responsible for implementing, operating, and maintaining complex core components across the platform, including developer-facing APIs, software development kits (SDKs), command-line interfaces (CLIs), the framework other teams use to build modules, and managed capabilities running on cloud infrastructure.
This is a deeply technical leadership role for an engineer who thrives on challenging distributed-systems problems, including secure cross-account communication, multi-tenant isolation, and creating abstractions that dramatically improve developer productivity. You will own complex systems end-to-end, establish technical direction and engineering standards, and mentor other engineers while partnering with Enterprise Architecture and cross-functional teams.
With a significant portion of the platform still in greenfield development, this position offers the opportunity to design foundational systems from first principles while evolving existing capabilities. Lead engineers on this team play a meaningful role in shaping the platform's architecture and standards, with a clear path toward Staff- or Principal-level technical leadership as the platform grows.
What You Will Be Responsible For:Platform Architecture, Technical Design, and Delivery- Lead the technical design, implementation, delivery, operation, and ongoing evolution of complex platform capabilities.
- Define engineering problems, evaluate architectural alternatives and technical tradeoffs, and propose scalable, secure, and maintainable solutions.
- Partner with the Enterprise Architecture team to design and implement foundational platform capabilities.
- Own complex components end-to-end, from developer-facing interfaces through the underlying cross-account cloud infrastructure that supports them.
- Design, develop, and maintain developer-facing APIs, SDKs, CLIs, module frameworks, and managed platform services.
- Build reusable abstractions and platform capabilities that enable other engineering teams to develop data products, applications, and AI-powered solutions without directly managing cloud infrastructure.
- Lead the development of greenfield platform capabilities while maintaining and evolving existing systems.
- Establish architectural patterns and technical approaches that support long-term scalability, reliability, security, and developer productivity.
Distributed Systems and Cloud Infrastructure- Design and build secure distributed systems that operate reliably across isolated AWS accounts and multi-tenant environments.
- Develop secure cross-account communication mechanisms and infrastructure supporting multi-tenant isolation.
- Design and implement provisioning and lifecycle automation for cloud-based platform capabilities.
- Build asynchronous and event-driven processing capabilities, including reliable message handling, retries, backoff strategies, and idempotent operations.
- Develop service discovery, reconciliation, and health-monitoring capabilities that support reliable platform operations.
- Apply distributed-systems principles, including at-least-once delivery, eventual consistency, failure-mode analysis, and resilient service interactions.
- Evaluate potential failure scenarios, including communication failures, service interruptions, and isolation-boundary violations, and design appropriate safeguards.
- Develop cloud-native solutions using AWS identity and access management, serverless compute, API services, managed data stores, event-driven services, and cloud security primitives.
- Build and maintain infrastructure using Terraform and established infrastructure-as-code practices.
Security Engineering and Platform Protection- Own the design and implementation of security-critical platform components and communication paths.
- Design and harden authenticated service-to-service communication mechanisms, including technologies such as mutual TLS (mTLS).
- Implement cryptographic signing, signature verification, and replay-protection mechanisms.
- Design and maintain secure identity and access management patterns across cloud accounts and services.
- Apply least-privilege access principles and secure multi-tenant isolation practices.
- Analyze security-related failure modes and potential isolation breaches to strengthen platform resilience.
- Ensure security requirements are integrated into platform architecture, interfaces, infrastructure, and operational practices.
SDK, API, and Module Framework Development- Lead the development and evolution of the platform's SDKs, APIs, CLIs, and shared module framework.
- Design reusable capabilities that allow engineering teams to focus on business logic while the platform manages common technical requirements.
- Define and implement interface contracts, data contracts, and consistent integration patterns.
- Develop framework functionality supporting authentication, authenticated dispatch, validation, metrics, retries, and reconciliation.
- Translate repeated engineering requirements into reusable, standardized platform components.
- Design developer-facing interfaces that promote consistency, maintainability, and productive integration across engineering teams.
- Support schema-driven interface definitions and validation to improve reliability and interoperability.
Technical Leadership, Standards, and Mentorship- Establish and guide the team's technical direction, architectural standards, and engineering best practices.
- Author and review technical designs and architecture decision records (ADRs) to document important engineering decisions and tradeoffs.
- Define and maintain interface standards, data contracts, testing expectations, infrastructure-as-code practices, and observability requirements.
- Provide technical leadership through architecture discussions, design reviews, code reviews, and collaborative problem-solving.
- Mentor mid-level and earlier-career engineers through technical feedback, pairing, and hands-on guidance.
- Raise engineering quality and team effectiveness by sharing expertise, improving development practices, and helping others build technical judgment.
- Contribute to the continuous improvement of engineering processes, development standards, and platform architecture.
Operational Excellence and Reliability- Own the operational reliability and production health of assigned platform components and services.
- Instrument platform services with appropriate metrics, logging, tracing, and observability capabilities.
- Define and support service-level objectives (SLOs) and operational reliability expectations.
- Participate in on-call rotations and investigate production incidents involving distributed systems, cross-account interactions, and cloud infrastructure.
- Troubleshoot complex failures and implement improvements that reduce recurring incidents and operational toil.
- Maintain strong build, test, and deployment discipline through continuous integration, automated testing, and reliable release practices.
- Apply trunk-based development, infrastructure as code, immutable and pinned releases, least-privilege access, and schema-validated interfaces.
- Continuously improve system resilience, debuggability, operational efficiency, and production stability.
AI-Assisted Engineering and AI-Enabled Platform Capabilities- Use modern AI-assisted software development tools, including coding assistants and agentic development technologies, to improve engineering effectiveness.
- Apply AI development tools to accelerate software development, technical problem-solving, and engineering productivity.
- Design and build AI-augmented capabilities within modular platform components.
- Integrate large language models (LLMs), AI agents, and managed AI services into platform capabilities.
- Evaluate and implement AI-related technologies that expand the functionality and value of DTN's Operational Decisioning Platform.
What You Will Bring to the Position:Professional Experience and Technical Leadership- 7+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production distributed systems.
- Demonstrated track record of independently owning complex software components and systems throughout their lifecycle.
- Ability to lead technical initiatives, establish engineering direction, and make sound architectural decisions.
- Experience mentoring other engineers through technical design guidance, code reviews, and collaborative development.
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent professional experience.
Cloud-Native Architecture and Distributed Systems- Deep expertise in AWS cloud-native architecture, including identity and access management, serverless compute, API layers, managed data stores, event-driven services, and cloud security primitives.
- Strong understanding of distributed-systems fundamentals, including idempotency, at-least-once delivery, eventual consistency, retries, backoff strategies, and rigorous failure-mode analysis.
- Experience designing, developing, and operating secure, reliable, and scalable distributed applications.
- Hands-on experience with infrastructure as code using Terraform.
- Strong software build, testing, and deployment discipline, including continuous integration and automated testing.
Security Engineering- Solid applied security engineering experience involving authenticated service-to-service communication, including technologies such as mTLS.
- Experience with cryptographic signing and verification, identity management, replay protection, and least-privilege access design.
- Ability to reason through complex security requirements, distributed-system failure scenarios, and multi-tenant isolation risks.
Programming, APIs, and Database Technologies- Proficiency in TypeScript/Node.js or demonstrated ability to become productive with these technologies quickly.
- Academic or professional software development exposure to front-end technologies such as React, Angular, or Vue.
- Academic or professional software development exposure to back-end technologies such as Node.js or Python.
- Academic or professional experience with SQL and database technologies such as PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, or equivalent database platforms.
- Expert-level experience developing APIs using RESTful services built with Node.js.
- Expert-level experience consuming both REST and GraphQL APIs.
- Journeyman-level knowledge of source control and versioning using Git.
AI Development and Platform Integration- Hands-on experience using modern AI-assisted development tools, including coding assistants and agentic tooling, to improve engineering productivity.
- Hands-on experience designing and building AI-augmented platform capabilities, including LLM and AI-agent integrations and managed AI services.
- Ability to incorporate AI-enabled functionality into modular, reusable platform components.
Collaboration and Engineering Judgment- Strong technical problem-solving skills and the ability to evaluate complex architectural alternatives.
- Ability to independently guide complex engineering work from design through production operation.
- Demonstrated ability to communicate technical direction, provide constructive engineering feedback, and mentor other engineers.
- Commitment to building secure, reliable, observable, and reusable engineering solutions.
What Will Make You Stand Out:- Experience building multi-tenant SaaS platforms, cross-account control planes, or internal developer platforms and SDKs.
- Experience designing APIs and SDKs consumed by other engineers, with particular attention to developer ergonomics, consistency, and usability.
- Familiarity with observability technologies such as OpenTelemetry.
- Experience with schema-driven interface validation.
- Awareness of multi-cloud architectures and technologies.
- Experience developing platform components using TypeScript/Node.js, Python, containers, Terraform, and modern AWS cloud-native services.
- Experience building secure cross-account infrastructure and developer-facing abstractions in greenfield platform environments.
- Familiarity with module frameworks that manage authenticated dispatch, signing, validation, metrics, and reconciliation.
- Experience applying trunk-based development, ADR-driven design, immutable or pinned releases, least-privilege access, and schema-validated interfaces.
- Background in operational or data-int
