Head of Platform Engineering

Job summary

Leads the engineering and operation of a secure shared platform for government identity services, enabling consistent application deployment across Azure, on-premises Red Hat OpenShift, AWS, and air-gapped customer environments. Sets the technical direction and roadmap, guides platform teams, and remains involved in design, infrastructure automation, and production troubleshooting. The platform supports national-scale services processing hundreds of millions of credential verifications annually, with security and compliance built into delivery.

Benefits

Qualifications

• Legally eligible to work in Canada and fluent in written and spoken English.
• Able to obtain and maintain Government of Canada Secret (Level II) security clearance.
• At least 10 years of infrastructure or software engineering leadership, including at least 5 years managing leads or managers across multiple teams.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• Demonstrated improvements in production reliability, performance, or operating cost, with measurable outcomes.
• Recent hands-on experience writing design specifications, implementing infrastructure or deployment automation, reviewing code and configurations, and diagnosing production failures.
• Practical expertise in at least two areas: Kubernetes/OpenShift operations; Azure or AWS infrastructure; CI/CD and GitOps; or reliability engineering.
• Experience building or substantially modernising a shared platform through production adoption, including upgrades, rollback, and operational handover.
• Experience delivering to regulated, government, or disconnected environments and implementing controlled releases using infrastructure as code and GitOps.
• Experience hiring and developing engineers and leads, using AI agents with human oversight and audit trails, and managing cloud spend and vendor contracts.
• Able to work evenings, weekends, and holidays as needed and travel approximately 1–2 weeks per year.

Responsibilities

• Set platform technical direction, review designs, and resolve cross-team technical issues across Azure, AKS, Kubernetes, and OpenShift.
• Guide engineers in GitOps, CI/CD, and infrastructure automation using Argo CD, Helm, Terraform, and JFrog Artifactory.
• Establish reusable deployment patterns and release standards, including secure registries, offline upgrades, and signed release bundles for air-gapped sites.
• Diagnose production failures and drive lasting fixes; define SLOs, observability, and capacity requirements.
• Oversee L2/L3 support, problem management, backups, and disaster recovery.
• Integrate security gates, SBOMs, image signing, SAST/DAST, and automated SOC 2/ISO 27001 evidence into delivery.
• Develop the platform roadmap, onboard jurisdictions, reduce bespoke deployments, and improve developer experience.
• Hire and develop engineers and team leads; allocate staff across DevOps, Infrastructure, and DevEx.
• Own platform spending and vendor contracts, and support cost optimisation.

Skills

Degrees

Languages

Work schedule

Travel

Industry

Security clearance

Relocation