Senior Platform Engineer (Boston)

Senior Platform Engineer (Data Platform) – Boston, MA

Overview

My client, an investment management firm based in Boston, is seeking a hands-on Senior Platform Engineer to play a key role in designing, automating, and operating an enterprise data platform.

In this position, you will contribute to the development and support of core data services that enable efficient onboarding of new data sources and transform them into actionable insights. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams to understand data requirements and enhance how data is ingested, processed, and delivered across the organization.

This role involves building scalable data pipelines, developing platform tooling, and implementing best practices in CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, reliability, security, and observability. You will also partner with business analysts to support advanced analytics and reporting capabilities.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and implement end-to-end CI/CD pipelines for data applications, services, and workflows using tools such as GitLab (including build, test, deploy, rollback, and environment management).
• Automate infrastructure provisioning and management using Terraform, emphasizing reusable, modular IaC patterns and GitOps workflows.
• Architect and operate a cloud-native data platform on AWS, supporting scalable data ingestion, transformation, storage, and access.
• Establish platform reliability standards including monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting, with a focus on resilience and multi-region architecture.
• Build and maintain deployment pipelines and release processes for batch and streaming data pipelines, APIs, and microservices.
• Manage containerized environments using Docker and Kubernetes (EKS), optimizing for performance, scalability, and cost efficiency.
• Implement security best practices including IAM, least-privilege access, and secrets management (e.g., KMS).
• Develop self-service tools and platform capabilities to connect data producers and consumers (e.g., templates, service catalogs, SLAs).
• Lead efforts to migrate and modernize legacy/on-premise data systems into a unified AWS-based data platform.
• Drive continuous improvement by evaluating new technologies, optimizing system performance, reducing operational overhead, and promoting engineering best practices.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in data engineering, platform engineering, DevOps, or similar roles supporting data-intensive systems.
• Strong programming skills in Python, with experience in testing frameworks and software engineering best practices.
• Advanced SQL skills and experience with data processing tools such as Spark and/or Pandas.
• Proven experience building scalable data pipelines (batch and/or streaming).
• Hands-on experience with AWS services such as S3, EC2, Lambda, Glue/EMR, Redshift/RDS, IAM, and VPC (3+ years preferred).
• Experience designing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines using tools like GitLab, GitHub, or Jenkins.
• Proficiency in Infrastructure as Code, preferably Terraform.
• Experience with containerization and orchestration technologies (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Strong understanding of data storage solutions (data lakes, warehouses, lakehouses) and data modeling techniques.
• Experience with query optimization and handling temporal or point-in-time data.
• Familiarity with monitoring and observability tools (e.g., CloudWatch, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack).
• Solid understanding of security best practices, especially in regulated environments.
• Strong system design skills with the ability to build scalable and reliable solutions.
• Excellent communication skills and experience working with cross-functional teams.
• Familiarity with Agile methodologies and DevSecOps practices.