Platform Engineering Lead

About DNAstack

At DNAstack, our mission is to power precision medicine by building software that breaks down barriers to responsible biomedical data sharing, discovery, and analysis. We build cutting-edge software and industry standards to help researchers and clinicians analyze sequencing data and make faster, more accurate diagnoses. Our platform supports national and international networks tackling rare disease, cancer, infectious disease, and more.

We’re a nimble, cross-functional team of scientists, engineers, designers, and product thinkers working at the intersection of genomics, software, and cloud technologies. Our mission is ambitious, and so is our team.

The Role

The Platform Engineering Lead sets the direction for the team behind the infrastructure our engineers and customers depend on: GCP and AWS environments, Kubernetes, Terraform and Helm, CI/CD, security and the tooling around them.

This is a player-coach role. You lead the team and stay hands-on: you review code, shape architecture and step in on implementation where it matters. You will own four things: the growth of the people on the team, the team's priorities, the platform roadmap (planned with Product), and the platform's technical direction.

What We Look For in a Lead

• Direction first. Clear, ranked priorities, and a reasoned "not yet" or "no".
• Shared ownership. Knowledge, on-call and decisions belong to the whole team, and we learn in the open.
• Technical credibility. You can read a Terraform plan, review a pull request and challenge an architecture proposal, and your feedback makes people better.
• Honest trade-offs. You make the cost and risk of every choice visible to the team, to Product and to leadership, including the case for more investment when the work calls for it.

What You’ll Do

Lead the team

• Manage and grow the team through 1:1s, career conversations, growth plans, performance reviews and hiring.
• Own the team's rituals, including planning, retrospectives and incident reviews.
• Build shared ownership with primary and secondary owners, pairing, shared on-call and written decisions.
• Coach senior engineers and build a culture of individual empowerment, accountability, and collaboration.

Set priorities and the roadmap

• Keep one ranked list of priorities that everyone can see. Triage requests from Product, Program Management and customers against it, and decide what the team defers or stops.
• Plan the platform roadmap with Product, so reliability, security, tooling and customer environments are planned alongside product features.
• Report progress, risks and spend to the VP of Product Development and the leadership team.

Set technical direction

• Set the direction of the platform and decide how technical decisions are made, documented and revisited.
• Guide architecture and stay hands-on through design reviews, code reviews and implementation.
• Settle technical trade-offs across teams and review major changes, including new customer deployments, for cost and risk.

Make every engineer faster

• Define how we measure delivery, including deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, time to restore and build and test durations, and act on what the numbers show.
• Set direction for the path from commit to production: fast, reliable CI, preview environments with representative genomic test data, and safe, routine deployments with progressive rollouts and automated rollback.
• Use AI and deterministic automation to give a small team leverage, with guardrails for agent access and KPIs that track time saved. Own the platform for AI-assisted development: tooling, access, licensing and budget.

Own cost, reliability and security

• Own the infrastructure budget across GCP, AWS and related tooling: forecast, track against plan and explain variances. Build cost visibility per environment, customer and product.
• Set cost targets and manage vendor and licensing relationships, with renewals planned well ahead.
• Own platform reliability: service level objectives for customer-facing environments, a clear rotation for on-call, deployments, alerts and support requests, incident response and blameless reviews.
• Partner with our Chief Information Officer and Chief Privacy and Security Officer on SOC 2 controls tracked in Drata. You own the technical side: access, secrets, CI and audit evidence.

What We’re Looking For

• 8+ years in DevOps, site reliability or platform engineering, including 3+ years managing engineers.
• Experience setting technical direction and priorities for a platform or infrastructure team, and managing senior engineers.
• Production experience with Kubernetes, Terraform and a CI system on GCP or AWS, and the hands-on skill to review and contribute to that work.
• Direct accountability for a cloud budget, with examples of cost reductions you delivered and how you measured them.
• Experience improving developer productivity, with the metrics to show it.
• A track record of automating repetitive operational work to give a small team leverage.
• Experience with SOC 2 or a comparable control framework, and comfort working with health or genomic data where access rules are strict and audited.
• Strong communication, including explaining technical trade-offs and costs to non-technical leaders, and ease working across global time zones.
  

Nice to Have

• Concourse CI experience. Our tooling is largely custom, so this is a head start, not a requirement.
• Experience running many environments from one platform.
• Experience using AI and automation to multiply output, including guardrails for agent access.
• Experience building cost allocation or showback models, or internal developer platforms.
• Familiarity with Java services built on Spring Boot, GA4GH standards or WDL workflow engines.
  

Why This Role Is Exciting

• Impact at scale: Your work will directly influence tools used by national and international genomics networks.
• Build something new: Shape a core function of the company from a small, senior team into a scalable, sustainable group.
• Cross-disciplinary collaboration: Work side by side with engineers, product managers, and scientists to turn bioinformatics into real-world solutions.
• Mission-driven: Contribute to solving rare disease, cancer, and infectious disease challenges by enabling precision medicine.
• Team culture: Enjoy a flexible, remote-friendly team culture along with a competitive salary, benefits, and employee stock option program.

Where You'll Work

This role offers the flexibility of remote work, with the option to work in person from our Toronto office. This arrangement supports your needs and promotes a healthy work–life balance.

Eligibility

To be considered for this position, you must be eligible to work in Canada.

Benefits

• Remote friendly, with flexible hours and the opportunity to work on-site at our Toronto office
• Comprehensive health benefits: medical, dental and vision coverage for you and your dependents
• Three weeks vacation
• Unlimited sick days
• Maternity and parental leave top-up programs
• One-time remote office set-up stipend
• Career development and learning support
• Opportunity to participate in DNAstack's Employee Stock Option Program
• Opportunity to contribute to open science and global data-sharing efforts

The salary range for this role is $165,000 to $185,000. At DNAstack, we are dedicated to providing pay transparency to all candidates. Compensation at DNAstack is determined through various factors including but not limited to: comparable salary market data within Canada, technical skill assessment, a holistic view of previous work history, and internal pay equity with other DNAstack team members.

DNAstack is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices. In accordance with the appropriate legislation in each jurisdiction in which we operate, we ensure that our team members are compensated within equal pay ranges for work of equal value, regardless of gender.

We regularly review our compensation practices to identify and address any pay equity gaps. Our approach considers skill, effort, responsibility, and working conditions to ensure that compensation decisions are objective, transparent, and free from bias.

Pay equity is an ongoing process, and we are committed to maintaining compliance with legislative requirements while fostering a workplace that values fairness, respect, and inclusion.

At DNAstack, we are committed to building and fostering an inclusive, accessible environment for everyone. If you have any questions, concerns, or requests regarding accessibility needs at any stage of the interview process, please contact [email protected] and we will work with you to meet your needs.

As a small but mighty team, we use AI-powered tools to help us stay organized and efficient during our hiring processes. These tools help in areas such as sorting applications and highlighting matches to the role. These tools help us move faster, but they definitely don't make decisions for us - every application is reviewed by a real human on our team.

Your privacy matters to us. Any information you share is handled according to Ontario privacy laws as well as our internal privacy practices. If you have any questions about how we use AI in our hiring process, please reach out to [email protected].

Note: this posting is for an existing vacancy that we are seeking to fill.

For compliance reasons, all offers of employment at DNAstack are conditional upon a successful background check that may consist of prior employment verification, reference checks, education confirmation, criminal background, or other information, as permitted by law.