Platform Engineering Team Lead

Platform Engineering Team Lead

We are seeking a strategic, hands-on Platform Engineering Team Lead to lead and grow our talented team of platform & DevOps engineers at Catena Media. In this leadership role, you will be accountable for the performance, culture, and output of the team, ensuring delivery of robust platform solutions that empower our engineering teams and accelerate product development.

Your mission will be to lead the design, development, and operational excellence of our internal platform team - treating it as a product - with a strong emphasis on automation, scalability, and developer enablement. You will combine people management with technical leadership, fostering a high-performing, collaborative team aligned with business objectives.

As the Team Lead, you will report directly to the Head of TechOps and Infrastructure, ensuring close alignment between platform engineering initiatives and the broader infrastructure and operations strategy.

Your Challenge:

• Lead and mentor a team of platform engineers, ensuring their growth, engagement, and performance.
• Define and own the team's delivery roadmap in collaboration with the Head of TechOps and Infrastructure.
• Foster a collaborative, inclusive engineering culture focused on innovation, ownership, and accountability.
• Oversee the architecture and development of core platform components, including CI/CD pipelines, AWS infrastructure, container orchestration, and CDN performance.
• Ensure engineering best practices, quality standards, and technical excellence across the team's deliverables.
• Drive the adoption of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform and promote automation to reduce manual operations.
• Support the team in resolving complex platform issues, ensuring reliability, scalability, and high availability.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with development, security, and product teams to align platform capabilities with developer and business needs.
• Work with the Head of TechOps and Infrastructure to prioritize team initiatives and align resources effectively.
• Champion continuous improvement, reduce operational toil, and build a culture focused on observability, reliability, and security.
• Oversee monitoring and incident response processes, encouraging proactive problem-solving and blameless postmortems.
• Ensure cost-effective use of cloud infrastructure, optimizing for performance and sustainability.

Leadership and Team Management Responsibilities:

• Managing team performance effectively through the practicing of ongoing performance management, including conducting performance reviews and regular 1-1 meetings
• Leading by example by delivering positive results and being a visible Catena ambassador
• Communicating effectively and ensuring information is delivered in a clear and timely manner
• Taking ownership of recruitment and selection for your team by working closely with HR and TA teams
• Enabling team and individual growth from the induction stage to ongoing learning and development

To Do It, You Will Need:

• Deep expertise in AWS services and Infrastructure as Code tools (e.g., Terraform, Ansible).
• Strong experience building and managing CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitHub Actions).
• Proven ability to lead the design and operation of containerized applications (Docker/ECS, Kubernetes/EKS).
• Hands-on knowledge of CDNs and performance optimization, especially Cloudflare.
• Solid understanding of observability, monitoring, and alerting tools and techniques.
• Strong interpersonal and communication skills, with the ability to align technical initiatives to business value.
• Passion for people development, continuous learning, and platform maturity.
• Demonstrated ability to work collaboratively with development teams and stakeholders.
• Willingness to learn and adapt to new technologies and methods as the platform evolves.