Team Lead – Platform Engineering

Job Title: Team Lead – Platform Engineering

Location: Winnipeg, MB (Hybrid)

Estimated Duration: Fulltime

Job Title: Platform Engineering Team Lead

Classification: Systems

Job Overview

Position Purpose

The Platform Engineering Team Lead drives the reliability, scalability, and efficiency of the organization’s software delivery ecosystem. They own the design and evolution of CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, and environment orchestration, combining hands-on engineering with operational leadership. This role builds and maintains reusable pipeline frameworks, automates release and environment workflows, and resolves complex deployment issues. By partnering closely with development, QA, Product, IT, and operations, the Team Lead reduces manual effort, enforces deployment and security standards, and accelerates safe, predictable delivery across all environments.

Scope of Responsibility

The Platform Engineering Team Lead architects, implements, and operates CI/CD pipelines and automation that support development and release activities across development, QA, staging, and production. Responsibilities include authoring and maintaining pipeline definitions, managing build and release processes, implementing infrastructure-as-code, and overseeing deployment tooling, configuration, and secrets management. The role leads troubleshooting for failed builds and deployments, coordinates rollbacks and hotfixes, and validates release artifacts in partnership with engineering and QA. The Team Lead also contributes to environment provisioning, observability configuration, and runbook development while mentoring engineers, promoting best practices, and ensuring adherence to security, compliance, and change-management processes. The Team Lead provides technical mentorship and helps to solve complex engineering challenges.

Impact on Organization

Strengthens organizational velocity and stability by improving deployment reliability and reducing lead time for changes. Their automation and CI/CD improvements lower manual effort, reduce human error, and shorten mean time to recovery during incidents. By enabling predictable, repeatable releases and improving developer productivity, the Team Lead enhances operational resilience and supports faster feature delivery, higher uptime, and a more consistent customer experience.

Reporting Structure

Reports to Vice President of Systems.

Major Job Areas and Responsibilities

1. Technical Leadership & Hands-on Delivery

•Lead architecture and implementation for cross-system initiatives while remaining an active contributor on high-impact or complex tasks.

•Code selectively to prototype solutions, unblock the team, and validate architectural choices rather than owning day-to-day feature work.

•Ensure technical consistency across projects by defining patterns and reviewing critical designs.

2. Requirements Analysis & Technical Design

•Collaborate on release requirements with Product, Engineering, and IT to translate delivery needs into pipeline architecture and runbook definitions.

•Define deployment topologies and environment architectures that support scalability, resilience, and compliance standards.

•Identify release risks and recommend mitigation strategies such as feature flags, staged rollouts, or automated validation gates.

•Specify observability requirements for each pipeline stage, ensuring logs, metrics, and tests are integrated into delivery workflows.

3. Quality Assurance & Testing for Delivery

•Integrate automated testing into CI/CD pipelines, including unit, integration, API, and smoke test suites.

•Validate release artifacts and confirm environment readiness through structured pre-deployment and post-deployment checks.

•Enforce pipeline gating to ensure only verified, high-quality artifacts advance to higher environments.

•Partner with QA to expand regression, performance, and reliability testing within CI/CD or scheduled automation.

4. Code Review & Collaboration

•Review automation code including pipeline definitions, IaC modules, and deployment scripts for consistency, security, and maintainability.

•Provide technical guidance on automation patterns, coding standards, and CI/CD best practices across engineering teams.

•Mentor engineers on pipeline debugging, environment provisioning, and modern DevOps tooling.

•Coordinate cross-team changes that impact shared services, deployment flows, or release schedules.

5. Production Support & Issue Resolution

•Triage deployment failures by analyzing logs, traces, and diagnostics to identify root causes and unblock releases.

•Coordinate hotfixes and rollbacks with development and operations teams while adhering to change-control processes.

•Create actionable incident tickets that document root causes, remediation steps, and follow-up engineering work.

•Maintain operational runbooks for common deployment issues, recovery procedures, and environment troubleshooting.

6. Agile Delivery & Team Participation

•Participate in Agile ceremonies to align CI/CD and platform work with sprint goals and release timelines.

•Estimate and deliver automation tasks predictably within sprint commitments.

•Communicate risks early when pipeline or environment issues may impact delivery schedules.

•Contribute to demos and retros by sharing deployment insights and driving continuous improvement in release processes.

7. Continuous Improvement & Platform Reliability

•Optimize pipeline performance through automation, caching, parallelization, and architectural improvements.

•Enhance pipeline observability with improved logging, metrics, and alerting to reduce detection and recovery time.

•Adopt modern DevOps practices such as policy-as-code, automated approvals, drift detection, and compliance automation.

•Document standards and templates to scale CI/CD practices and reduce operational bottlenecks.

•Perform other duties as required to support platform stability and delivery excellence.

Education & Experience and Competencies

Education and Experience

•Bachelor’s degree or equivalent in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or related discipline, or comparable hands-on industry experience.

•8+ years of engineering experience in software, platform, DevOps, or operations roles, including 3–5 years owning CI/CD, release automation, or platform engineering responsibilities.

•Demonstrated ownership of delivery pipelines supporting end-to-end build, test, and deployment workflows across multiple environments.

•Experience collaborating across functions with Development, QA, Product, and IT/Cloud teams to design deployment workflows and resolve production issues.

•Familiarity with governance processes including change management, release controls, and audit/compliance requirements for production deployments.

Technical Competencies

•Hands-on CI/CD expertise with systems such as Bamboo, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or Azure DevOps.

•Infrastructure-as-Code proficiency using tools like Terraform, Ansible, ARM/Bicep, or CloudFormation to provision and manage environments.

•Containerization and orchestration experience including Docker, Kubernetes, AKS, EKS, or GKE, and modern deployment strategies (blue/green, canary).

•Strong scripting capabilities in Bash, PowerShell, Python, or TypeScript for automation, tooling, and pipeline logic.

•Cloud platform experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP, including build/deploy services, IAM, and environment automation.

•Observability tooling familiarity using Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/Elastic, Azure Monitor, or similar systems for pipeline and deployment troubleshooting.

•Artifact and secrets management expertise with tools such as Artifactory, Nexus, npm, NuGet, Vault, Key Vault, or AWS Secrets Manager.

•Secure build and compliance understanding including dependency scanning, policy-as-code, and pipeline hardening practices.

•Advanced Git proficiency implementing branching strategies, PR validation, and merge gating.

•Automated testing integration including unit, integration, and smoke tests within CI/CD workflows.

Core Competencies

•Automation-first mindset to eliminate manual steps, accelerate feedback loops, and improve delivery reliability.

•Strong diagnostic skills to quickly isolate root causes of pipeline or deployment failures and implement durable fixes.

•Cross-functional collaboration with engineering, QA, Product, and IT to align on release requirements, risk mitigation, and deployment timelines.

•Clear communication of release status including risks, rollback plans, and environment readiness to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

•Balanced governance application applying change control, release gating, and audit practices without compromising delivery velocity.

•Metrics-driven optimization using lead time, deployment success rate, and MTTR to guide pipeline improvements.

•Technical mentorship providing guidance on CI/CD best practices, debugging techniques, and IaC patterns.

•Adaptability to new tools with the ability to evaluate emerging technologies and recommend pragmatic improvements to the platform.