The Team

The Gates Foundation is seeking a Senior Platform Engineer to design and scale a modern data and AI platform that accelerates impact across global health, development, education, Gender Equality and humanitarian initiatives.

In this role, you will lead the development of a secure, governed, and scalable platform built on Azure, Databricks, and Snowflake, enabling advanced analytics and responsible generative AI solutions using OpenAI and Claude. You will play a critical role in unlocking insights from both structured and unstructured data (e.g., research reports, program documents, surveys, and field data) and making them accessible through API-driven data services and intelligent search using Azure AI Search.

You will also help ensure that data and AI systems are ethical, transparent, and aligned with global data governance standards, leveraging tools such as Collibra.

• Lead the architecture and development of a cloud-native Data and AI platform on Azure, Databricks Lakehouse and Snowflake

• Design and implement API-first data platform to enable secure, governed data sharing across teams, partners, and global stakeholders

• Operationalize GenAI solutions for knowledge discovery and decision support, including:

  • Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures

  • Integration with OpenAI and Claude APIs

  • Semantic and hybrid search using Azure AI Search

• Create design patterns for document ingestion, parsing, OCR, metadata extraction, and enrichment

• Design and implement embedding and vector search strategies for unstructured data

• Lead the implementation of data governance and stewardship practices using Collibra, including:

  • Data cataloging, lineage, and metadata management

  • Data quality frameworks and stewardship workflows

  • Alignment with global privacy, security, and compliance standards

• Establish secure data access patterns (RBAC/ABAC), ensuring detection (PHI/PII scanning) and protection of sensitive data

• Build reusable platform services, APIs, and tools that enable self-service analytics and AI development

• Implement observability, monitoring, and evaluation frameworks for data pipelines and AI/LLM systems

• Optimize platform performance, scalability, and cost efficiency via FinOps dashboards

• Develop lightweight application for search and discovery, cataloging, and onboarding new datasets

• Bachelor’s or master’s in computer science or related field or equivalent experience

• Experience with analyzing and extracting insights from health and life sciences data (internal and external public repositories) using analytical and reporting tools

• 12+ years’ experience in platform engineering and/or software engineering, with a focus on advanced analytics, AI/ML Infrastructure, data security and automation

• Manage and drive improvements of a lightweight custom application (Data Portal) for self-service data cataloging, search and discovery

• Strong programming skills in Python, C#, .Net and SQL

• Hands-on experience with:

  • Azure (Data Lake, Azure ML, Event Hubs, etc.)

  • IaC automating infrastructure provisioning using Terraform

  • Databricks (Lakeflow, Spark, Delta Lake, workflows, Unity Catalog)

  • Snowflake (Iceberg, Horizon catalog, Cortex AI, secure data sharing)

• Experience designing and building API-driven data platforms (REST/GraphQL, microservices)

• Experience working with unstructured data processing

• Familiarity with building data pipelines with Databricks and DBT Cloud and orchestration

• Familiarity with Docker, Kubernetes, and distributed systems

Strong understanding of:

• RAG architectures, embeddings, and vector databases

• Document chunking, indexing, and retrieval strategies

• Previous experience with Salesforce would be a plus

• Experience with document processing/NLP pipelines (OCR, entity extraction, classification)

• Collibra and Data Governance

The salary range for this role is $157,400 to $236,000 USD. We recognize high-wage market differences in Seattle and Washington D.C., where our offices are located. The range for this role in these locations is $173,100 to $259,700 USD. As a mission-driven organization, we strive to balance competitive pay with our mission. New hires salaries are typically between the range minimum and the salary range midpoint. Actual placement in the range will depend on a candidate’s job-related skills, experience, and expertise, as evaluated during the interview process.

Must have unrestricted work authorization in the country where this position is located. The Foundation does not provide immigration-related sponsorship for this role. This includes direct company sponsorship and any work authorization requiring a written submission or other immigration support from the company (eg: H-1B, O-1, L-1, E, OPT, STEM-OPT, CPT, TN, J-1, etc.).