Technical Platform Engineering Lead / Software Engineering Manager

Job Title: Technical Platform Engineering Lead / Software Engineering Manager

Location: Plano, TX Onsite

Duration: 12+ Months - W2 Contract

Technical Platform Engineering Lead to design, build, and scale enterprise-grade platforms that support software applications, shared services, and data services. This role is not a traditional people-manager position; it requires deep hands-on expertise in platform architecture, developer platforms, cloud-native services, and data platforms, with strong technical leadership across multiple engineering teams.

Candidate understands how platforms work end-to-end from application runtime platforms to service orchestration and data platforms and can drive platform strategy, standards, and adoption across the organization.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect and build enterprise platform foundations supporting:
  • Software applications
  • Shared software services (APIs, microservices, messaging)
  • Data services (pipelines, streaming, analytics platforms)
• Define platform architecture, standards, and reference implementations for app teams.
• Design and govern platform capabilities such as:
  • CI/CD pipelines, developer portals, service catalogs
  • Observability, reliability, security, and scalability
• Lead technical design of cloud-native platforms (containers, Kubernetes, PaaS, serverless).
• Drive integration patterns between application platforms, service platforms, and data platforms.
• Work closely with product, application, and data teams to enable self-service platform capabilities.
• Establish platform reliability engineering (SRE), performance, and cost-optimization practices.
• Mentor senior engineers and act as technical authority for platform decisions.
• Evaluate tools and technologies for platform evolution and modernization.

Required Skills & Experience

• 12 15+ years of overall experience in platform engineering / software architecture / cloud engineering.
• Strong hands-on experience building platforms for:
  • Software applications (runtime platforms, frameworks, APIs)
  • Software services (microservices, service mesh, messaging/eventing)
  • Data services (data pipelines, streaming platforms, analytics platforms)
• Deep expertise in cloud-native architecture (AWS/Azure/Google Cloud Platform), containers, Kubernetes, and PaaS.
• Strong experience with:
  • API platforms, service orchestration, event-driven architectures
  • CI/CD, DevOps, Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/CloudFormation)
  • Observability (logging, metrics, tracing) and reliability engineering
• Good understanding of data platform architecture (Kafka, Spark, data lakes/warehouses).
• Strong architectural mindset with hands-on implementation experience.
• Ability to influence without formal people-management authority