Platform Engineering Deputy Practice Lead

The Platform Engineering Deputy Practice Lead is a key leadership role within our organization, focused on enabling platform teams to deliver secure, scalable, and high-performing infrastructure systems that empower developers and accelerate delivery. This role requires deeply embedding with platform teams to mentor engineers, foster operational and security excellence, and build scalable, compliant platforms that serve business and mission needs.

The ideal candidate combines strong technical depth with exceptional coaching ability and empathetic communication skills, helping teams grow both their systems and their people at scale.

Key Responsibilities

• Embed with platform teams to assess strengths, identify areas for growth, and drive improvements across architecture, operations, and security compliance.
• Coach engineers and technical leads in platform-as-a-product thinking, SRE practices, and DevSecOps methodologies, with a focus on empathetic leadership and technical excellence.
• Develop and deliver internal training and workshops that promote Rise8's platform engineering philosophy, security-first mindset, and scalable operating models.
• Guide teams in building secure, scalable, and self-serviceable paths to production, balancing developer autonomy with governance and risk management.
• Lead initiatives to automate security compliance, including NIST 800-53 controls mapping, continuous vulnerability scanning, and OSCAL-based evidence generation for ongoing authorization (cATO).
• Mentor teams on integrating vulnerability management, secure software supply chain practices, and runtime security into platform workflows.
• Promote sustainable platform evolution by managing technical debt, automating away toil, and improving service reliability at scale.
• Improve system observability through standardized logging, monitoring, tracing, and incident response processes.
• Assist teams in evaluating and adopting new platform tools (e.g. Kubernetes platforms, CI/CD tooling, service meshes, policy enforcement engines) with a focus on long-term maintainability and security.
• Support debugging and production incidents  across platform services, networking, CI/CD pipelines, and security
• Help define and improve DORA metrics across platform environments.
• Actively contribute to organizational growth through technical hiring, scoping new engagements, and building scalable internal practices for platform operations.

Key Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in platform engineering, cybersecurity, SRE, and DevOps roles, operating systems at scale in cloud-native and/or hybrid environments.
• Excellent communication, facilitation, and coaching skills, with a strong emphasis on clarity, empathy, and fostering cross-functional collaboration.
• Proven success mentoring and coaching platform teams, emphasizing both technical capability growth and healthy, empathetic team dynamics.
• Deep technical expertise in Kubernetes, cloud services (AWS preferred), infrastructure-as-code (e.g. Terraform, Pulumi), GitOps, and container security.
• Extensive experience implementing and automating NIST 800-53 compliance frameworks, including controls mapping, vulnerability management, and continuous security scans.
• Strong understanding of secure architectures, identity and access management (IAM/SSO), service mesh, and Zero Trust security patterns.
• Track record of helping teams evolve platform services to support scaling businesses and rapidly growing mission-critical environments.
• Ability to diagnose and resolve complex infrastructure, security, and operational challenges in fast-paced, mission-driven environments.
• Passion for platform enablement: reducing developer cognitive load, scaling reliability, and creating delightful, compliant infrastructure experiences.

Desired Experience

• Demonstrated success in technical leadership roles, including coaching, mentoring, and growing platform engineers and teams.
• Practical experience in growing infrastructure services from early stages to large-scale, production-grade systems.
• Expertise implementing multi-cluster Kubernetes environments with GitOps deployment models (e.g. ArgoCD, FluxCD).
• Familiarity with security tooling such as Trivy, SonarQube, Connaisseur, Kyverno, and SD Elements for continuous compliance.
• Prior experience applying Risk Management Framework (RMF)  to government systems and achieving authorization (e.g. IATT, ATO, CTF)
• Knowledge of modern developer experience (DevEx) practices, including golden paths, developer portals, and internal documentation strategies.
• Prior experience designing and operating platforms for highly regulated environments (e.g., DoD IL4-IL6, FedRAMP, HIPAA).
• Expertise in site reliability engineering (SRE) concepts such as SLAs, SLOs, error budgets, and incident management.

Salary 

The annual salary range for this role as it is posted is $191,667 - $239,583 regardless of final candidate location within the United States. The final job level and annual salary will be determined based on the education, qualification, knowledge, skills, ability, and experience of the final candidate(s), and calibrated against relevant market data and internal team equity. 

Benefits 

• Flexible schedule in a 100% distributed workforce 
• Premium Insurance: We cover up to 100% of the employee premium and up to 80% of the combined dependent premium on our base health plan, depending on pay band. We also cover 100% of the premium for employee and dependent Dental and Vision as well as employee premiums for Life and Disability coverage.
• Retirement: 401k match at 10% gross pay.
• Paid time off (PTO): 4 weeks combined accrued vacation and sick leave, 11 Federal holidays, your birthday, jury duty, and bereavement.
• Education & Training: Accrued budget of up to $3,500 per year for classes, travel, events, and materials.
• Home Office and Merch: We offer $750 per year for home office technology and equipment as well as $100 per year for Rise8 merch from our Swag Store.
• Wellness Budget: To encourage and support a well-rounded healthy lifestyle, we cover 100% reimbursement on a variety of wellness activities and products, up to $500 per calendar year. Or Rise8 is part of the the Life Time Corporate Partner program. In lieu of your $500 annual wellness benefit, you can instead get a $75 monthly credit towards a Life Time membership ($900 annual benefit).
• Equipment: We offer a MacBook Pro