Lead Platform Engineer

About Signant Health

At Signant Health, we help bring life-changing treatments to patients faster. We are a global evidence generation company supporting clinical trials through smart technology, scientific expertise, and hands-on operational support — because better data leads to better healthcare decisions. Our teams work at the intersection of science, technology, and patient experience, delivering digital solutions that make clinical trials more efficient, accurate, and accessible worldwide. Trusted by leading pharmaceutical companies and CROs, our platforms and services support studies in more than 90 countries and have contributed to hundreds of new drug approvals. If you are motivated by meaningful work, global impact, and innovation in clinical research and digital health, you will find purpose — and opportunity — at Signant Health.

About the Role

The Lead Platform Engineer is an AI-first, hands-on technical leader who will shape and evolve Signant Health's Internal Developer Platform (IDP) and Enterprise Platform (ETP), with responsibility for driving the integration of AI-powered tooling, agentic engineering patterns, and LLM-powered automation into the platform ecosystem. This role is for someone who combines deep infrastructure expertise with a high drive for modernizing legacy systems, building AI-powered self-service capabilities, and championing agent-driven operations that progressively automate routine platform tasks.

You will be the technical driving force behind platform strategy — designing scalable infrastructure, building intelligent CI/CD pipelines, modernizing legacy systems, and embedding AI-assisted workflows into the tools and processes that Signant's engineering teams rely on daily. The platform landscape spans modern cloud-native services and legacy infrastructure inherited through M&A growth, and the Lead Platform Engineer will drive modernization and migration strategies while maintaining operational continuity across both worlds.

As a Lead Platform Engineer, you will steer the technical direction and delivery of platform infrastructure, tools, and processes that empower engineering teams and ensure business continuity. You will evaluate, prototype, and champion AI-powered tooling — including AI Copilots, agentic systems, and LLM-powered developer workflows — that enhance developer experience and engineering velocity across the organization. You will manage work across multiple concurrent release trains (IDP and ETP releases running in parallel), coordinating dependencies and deadlines while maintaining delivery quality. This is a hands-on leadership role that combines deep technical expertise with the ability to mentor, influence, and collaborate across cross-functional teams while maintaining a sharp focus on long-term architectural quality and scalability.

What you will do

• Platform Strategy & AI Integration: Drive the technical strategy and roadmap for the IDP and ETP, ensuring alignment with organizational goals, the "IDP as a Product" vision, and the integration of AI-powered developer tooling and agentic engineering patterns into the platform.
• Infrastructure as Code: Lead the design and implementation of IaC solutions using Pulumi, Terraform, and Groovy for Jenkins shared libraries, incorporating AI-assisted code generation and review to accelerate delivery.
• CI/CD Pipelines: Architect and maintain scalable CI/CD pipelines that leverage intelligent automation, AI-powered testing, and LLM-assisted pipeline optimization to enable efficient, reliable deployment processes.
• Platform Reliability: Ensure the high availability, performance, and reliability of critical platform services including Jenkins, Confluent Kafka, MongoDB Atlas, ArgoCD, Kubernetes (EKS), Kong Gateway, Okta, CloudFront CDN, Backstage, and Rancher.
• Agent-Driven Operations: Champion an agent-driven operations model for the Enterprise Platform — building AI agents that autonomously audit Kubernetes clusters, monitor Okta tenants, triage operational tickets, manage upgrade backlogs, and execute routine infrastructure tasks with human oversight, progressively reducing manual intervention.
• AI-Powered Self-Service: Leverage generative AI and LLM-powered automation to expand platform self-service capabilities — reducing manual intervention, accelerating developer onboarding, and enabling product teams to provision, configure, and troubleshoot platform resources without PE involvement.
• Legacy Modernization: Drive the modernization of legacy infrastructure — including WebLogic CI environments, fragmented CI/CD toolchains (Jenkins, Azure DevOps, CodePipeline), and VM-based deployments — with a bias toward containerization, IaC, and self-service patterns that reduce operational toil and technical debt.
• Migration & Consolidation: Support modernization and migration initiatives — including the consolidation of fragmented CI/CD toolchains and the migration from Bitbucket to GitHub — ensuring minimal disruption to product teams during transitions.
• Collaboration & Resiliency: Collaborate with CloudOps and other teams to safeguard resources, improve platform resiliency, and navigate shared ownership boundaries for infrastructure components (AWS, Terraform, Pulumi, monitoring).
• Mentoring & AI Literacy: Mentor and coach engineers to foster a culture of continuous learning, AI literacy, and accountability — helping team members develop proficiency with AI-assisted development tools and practices, and fostering an InnerSource culture where product teams contribute back to the platform.
• Incident Management: Lead structured incident response, root cause analysis, and post-mortem processes for platform services, driving systemic improvements that prevent recurrence.
• Vendor Management: Participate in vendor technical evaluations, build-vs-buy decisions, and manage relationships with external service providers (e.g., Eficode for Jenkins/SonarQube/Artifactory hosting), navigating the operational constraints of vendor-managed critical infrastructure.
• Adaptability: Demonstrate adaptability in a fast-moving environment where priorities shift frequently — balancing strategic roadmap execution with ad-hoc operational disruptions, urgent customer escalations, and cross-team support requests without losing momentum on long-term initiatives.
• AI Innovation: Contribute to Signant's AI Innovation Council and engineering-wide initiatives around developer productivity, AI governance, and platform modernization.

Preferred Qualifications

• Mastery in Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools: Pulumi, Terraform, and Groovy for Jenkins shared libraries.
• Deep knowledge of Kubernetes (K8s), including cluster management, deployment strategies, scaling, Helm/Kustomize templating, and GitOps practices with ArgoCD and Rancher.
• Advanced proficiency in AWS cloud services (EKS, Lambda, SAM, IAM, CloudFront, Route53, Secrets Manager) including multi-account management with hub-spoke networking architectures, and identity platforms (Okta SSO, Azure AD integration).
• Experience building and managing CI/CD pipelines using modern DevOps practices, and operating managed platform services including Confluent Kafka (event streaming, Debezium CDC connectors, Schema Registry), MongoDB Atlas, and AWS CloudFront CDN in production environments.
• Strong programming or scripting skills (e.g., Python, Go, or Bash).
• Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code) and a practical understanding of how to build and integrate AI platform capabilities — including MCP servers, LLM-powered automation, agentic engineering patterns, prompt engineering, and context engineering — into the platform ecosystem.
• A high drive for modernizing legacy systems, with demonstrated experience migrating workloads from traditional infrastructure (VMs, on-premise tools, fragmented CI/CD toolchains) to cloud-native, automated, self-service platforms.
• An architecture-first mindset — able to design systems, evaluate trade-offs, and make technical decisions that prioritize long-term platform health over short-term velocity.
• Proven ability to operate effectively in environments with competing priorities, context-switching between strategic platform development and urgent production issues while maintaining delivery quality across both.
• A hands-on technical leader who codes, reviews architecture, and contributes directly to platform implementation.
• Comfortable operating in a lean, talent-dense team where every engineer is expected to deliver high-impact work across the full stack.

Desirable Qualifications

• Demonstrated success in driving cost optimization initiatives for platform or cloud environments.
• Experience with GitHub and GitHub Actions for source control, CI/CD, and developer workflow automation; familiarity with large-scale repository migration strategies.
• Familiarity with observability tools (e.g., Dynatrace, Icinga) and DORA metrics for measuring DevOps performance.
• Experience with or strong interest in agentic systems, multi-agent orchestration, and AI-driven operational automation (AIOps).
• Exposure to regulated industries (e.g., healthcare, life sciences, GxP environments) where platform changes require structured change control and compliance documentation.

Why Signant Health?

At Signant Health, your work has real impact. Everything we build, support, and deliver helps advance clinical research and bring new treatments to patients faster — improving lives around the world. Our teams combine science, technology, and operational expertise to solve complex clinical trial challenges, and every role contributes to that mission. We offer a collaborative, global environment where you can grow your career while working alongside experts across clinical, technology, data, and operations, with opportunities to learn, take ownership, and drive meaningful innovation — not just maintain the status quo. If you are looking for purpose-driven work, smart colleagues, and the opportunity to help shape the future of clinical research and digital health, Signant Health is the place to do it.

Key skills/competency

• Platform Engineering
• AI Integration
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
• CI/CD Pipelines
• Kubernetes (K8s)
• AWS Cloud Services
• DevOps Practices
• Legacy Modernization
• Agentic Engineering
• Mentorship & Leadership