Engineering Lead, Platform Engineering

Role overview

Hands-on Engineering Lead, Platform Engineering at Koalafi. You will own both people leadership and platform delivery, bridging platform strategy and team execution with quality and predictability. You’ll partner closely with the Cloud Architect, translate strategy into an actionable backlog, and lead the team to deliver it.

Koalafi operates in an AI-forward environment, and you’re expected to use AI tools yourself while helping establish responsible AI conditions for the team.

Responsibilities

People leadership & team development

• Manage a team of engineers with accountability for performance, growth, and wellbeing
• Own 1:1s, performance reviews, and career development conversations with constructive feedback
• Build a culture that’s organized, reliable, and impact-focused
• Mentor through code reviews, pairing, and delivery coaching
• Partner with the VP on escalations; shape team working norms and resolve friction

Technical execution

• Act as a strong technical contributor with significant engineering ownership
• Own day-to-day technical decisions within the team’s scope
• Translate architecture direction into sprint-level actionable tasks
• Build and evolve CI/CD pipelines and delivery automation for safety, consistency, and velocity
• Improve observability (metrics, logging, distributed tracing, alerting), including actionable dashboards and SLO-based alerting
• Create automation/self-service workflows using infrastructure-as-code, APIs, and developer platforms
• Implement secure delivery practices with policy-driven pipeline controls
• Contribute to infrastructure using Terraform within established architectural patterns
• Support secrets management across runtime and CI/CD workflows
• Champion AI-assisted development practices (prompt workflows, AI-powered code review, tooling integrations)

Operational readiness

• Coordinate incident response: drive process, communicate status, and ensure correct escalation
• Participate in on-call and reduce incidents/alert noise over time
• Maintain runbooks, escalation paths, and documentation
• Drive production readiness as an ongoing standard (not a one-time checklist)

Requirements

• Experience leading engineers in a formal people manager capacity (performance, growth, culture)
• Strong platform engineering background with ownership of delivery, reliability, and operational readiness

Nice-to-haves

• Experience establishing responsible AI workflows in engineering processes (e.g., code review/tooling integrations)
• Experience with Terraform-based infrastructure and policy-controlled CI/CD pipelines