Please note the base salary will be determined by the successful candidate's education***, skills and experience. The listed salary range serves as a general pay guideline for this position's pay level.***

Platform Engineering Lead

Location: Remote - Anywhere in Canada

Reporting the Director, IT Cloud Transformations and Infrastructure the Platform Engineering lead will help to spearhead the strategic development and evolution of our internal development platform (IDP). This pivotal role will establish and champion Platform Engineering principles, treating our developers as customers and empowering them with self-service capabilities to significantly enhance their productivity and the overall delivery velocity of our software products. The position demands a person who understands that the platform is a product, with its success measured by user adoption and satisfaction, enabling developers to focus on core business logic by reducing their cognitive load.

You will lead a cross functional team, driving the architectural design, implementation, and continuous improvement of a robust, scalable, and secure platform across multi-cloud environments, specifically Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Why pursue this opportunity

• Our mission - Provide expertise and intelligent solutions to help Canadians navigate life with confidence.
• Join a transforming business - we are a medium-sized Canadian company in a stable industry which is rapidly transforming.
• Impactful work - get the opportunity to work on meaningful projects that have a positive impact on our customers, our company, and society as a whole.
• Hone your skills - this is an opportunity that allows for you to grow your technical, and functional skills.

What you’ll be working on

• Platform Leadership: Lead the definition, architecture, and evolution of our internal development platform (IDP) from inception to continuous improvement, ensuring it aligns with organizational strategy and adheres to stringent security best practices. This involves a proactive approach to building a service that enables developers, rather than merely managing infrastructure.
• Cross-functional Leadership: Build, lead, and mentor a high-performing cross-functional team, fostering a culture of technical excellence, collaboration, and continuous learning. This includes providing technical guidance, and driving process improvements to optimize team efficiency and output.
• Platform Engineering Principles & Product Mindset: Champion the adoption of core Platform Engineering principles, including self-service enablement, abstraction of complexity, and a product-centric approach to internal tooling, with a relentless focus on enhancing Developer Experience (DX). This means guiding developers "into the pit of success" by making the most efficient and compliant path the easiest to follow.
• CI/CD & GitOps Mastery: Promote, maintain and enhance, automated Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. Implement and enforce GitOps practices using ArgoCD as the declarative continuous deployment tool for Kubernetes, ensuring Git remains the single source of truth for all configurations and enabling automated synchronization and drift detection.
• Containerization & Orchestration: Lead the adoption, management and optimization of containerization technologies, demonstrating deep expertise in Kubernetes for deploying and managing cloud-native applications, including the implementation of advanced orchestration patterns. This ensures applications are scalable, resilient, and portable across environments.
• Comprehensive Observability: Collaborate with the SRE team to promote, maintain, and manage advanced monitoring, logging, and tracing solutions. This involves strategically adopting OpenTelemetry (oTel) for vendor-neutral, end-to-end telemetry collection and analysis, providing deep insights into platform and application performance.
• Security & Compliance by Design: Collaborate with Security teams to embed security best practices, governance, and compliance into all aspects of platform design, development, and operations (DevSecOps). This includes ensuring "golden paths" guide developers towards secure and compliant solutions, secure access management, and robust secret storage mechanisms.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner closely with product, architecture, security, and development teams to gather requirements, align on roadmaps, and ensure the platform effectively meets the evolving needs of the organization, fostering a cohesive and collaborative engineering environment.
• Performance & Cost Optimization: Drive initiatives for platform performance tuning, cost optimization, and scalability, ensuring efficient resource utilization and continuous improvement of platform efficiency across all environments.

What we’re looking for you to have

Background

• Education: University degree/college diploma in related discipline(s)
• Experience: 5+ years of progressive experience in software engineering, DevOps, or Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) roles, with at least 2-3 years specifically in a Platform Engineer capacity.

Technical Skills

• Cloud Platforms: Deep hands-on expertise with major public cloud providers, specifically Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), including their core compute, storage, networking, and serverless services.
• Containerization & Orchestration: Expert-level proficiency in Kubernetes (K8s) and containerization technologies (e.g., Docker, Podman, Helm). Extensive experience with managing and optimizing Kubernetes clusters in production environments.
• CI/CD & GitOps: Extensive experience designing, implementing, and optimizing end-to-end CI/CD pipelines. Mastery of GitOps principles and hands-on experience with ArgoCD for declarative Kubernetes deployments, including automated synchronization, rollback, and drift detection.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Strong proficiency with IaC tools, particularly Terraform, for managing cloud and Kubernetes infrastructure. A deep understanding of the "everything-as-code" philosophy is foundational for consistent and auditable deployments.
• Observability: Proven experience implementing comprehensive monitoring, logging, and tracing solutions. Hands-on experience with monitoring tools such as DataDog and a deep understanding of OpenTelemetry (oTel) for vendor-neutral telemetry collection, processing, and analysis.
• Programming & Scripting: Strong proficiency in at least one modern programming language (e.g., Python, Go, Bash) for automation, tooling development, and API integration.
• Cloud-Native Ecosystem: Solid understanding of the broader Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) landscape, microservices architectures, and distributed systems.
• Security: Strong understanding of cloud security best practices, including Identity and Access Management (IAM), encryption, secret management, and embedding security controls into CI/CD pipelines (DevSecOps)

Soft Skills

• Exceptional communication (written and verbal), and presentation skills, with the ability to influence and collaborate effectively across all levels of the organization and with diverse stakeholders.
• Demonstrated ability to drive change, foster a culture of continuous improvement, and make data-driven decisions, balancing short-term needs with long-term strategic vision.
• Strong problem-solving abilities, strategic thinking, and a proactive, solution-oriented approach to complex technical challenges.
• A strong product mindset with a relentless focus on understanding developer needs and continuously improving Developer Experience (DX).

If you are applying for a position which is open to applicants across Canada, unless otherwise indicated in the position, language proficiency in English is required for communicating with customers, advisors, or employees across Canada.

Beyond the salary

For permanent full-time positions, Empire Life offers a comprehensive total rewards package that includes:

• Competitive salaries with annual pay increases
• Annual bonus program, which recognizes both strong company performance and individual contributions, for non sales positions
• Competitive uncapped commission, for sales positions
• A comprehensive employer-funded benefits package starting from day one of employment, that includes life insurance, disability, health and dental and a generous health account
• Flexible work arrangements and an annual allotment of personal health days.
• Four weeks annual vacation from hire date
• A defined contribution pension plan with generous employer matching
• Top up programs for parental leave and compassionate leave
• Employer-sponsored wellness and recognition programs
• A cash employee referral program

To learn more about working at Empire Life, visit https://www.empire.ca/workatempire.

Get to know us

Empire life is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity, are committed to creating an inclusive environment, and welcome everyone to participate in our application process. We encourage those of all backgrounds and experiences to apply, even if you don't believe you meet each unique qualification outlined. Applicants will receive equal consideration without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, or age.

Empire Life welcomes applications from people with disabilities and disabled people. Accommodations are available upon request for candidates taking part in all aspects of the screening and selection process. If you need this job posting in an alternative format or have any accessibility questions, please contact recruitment@empire.ca .