What are the responsibilities and job description for the Platform Engineering Manager position at Power Design?
About The Position
As Platform Engineering Manager at Power Design, you'll lead the buildout of our Platform Engineering function within IT Infrastructure & Operations — transforming a small, operationally focused team into an engineering-led discipline with automation, self-service, and observability at its core. This is a player/coach role: you'll design and automate core infrastructure across our cloud-forward stack (Microsoft Azure, AWS, Oracle Cloud, Egnyte, Workday, Autodesk Construction Cloud) while technically leading and mentoring the engineers around you. You'll own the evaluation and implementation of Power Design's first enterprise AIOps and observability platform, set architectural standards, and partner with cross-functional teams as the function matures. The ideal candidate challenges the on-premises default, evaluates infrastructure decisions through a cloud-first lens, and has the hands-on experience to execute on that vision.
Position Responsibilities
About Us
Power Design is a National Design Build Contractor, focused on innovative construction across multiple trades: electrical, mechanical, plumbing, and systems technologies. Since 1989, we’ve disrupted the industry by putting next-generation ideas to powerful, practical use because we care. We design breakthrough solutions that push the limits of what’s possible by harnessing the collaborative power of our teams to elevate experiences and empower the communities where we live and work. In an industry that tends to look back, we’re building better by staying grounded in our values, dedicated to our unique culture, and supportive of work-life balance – making us built to last. By investing in our people and doing things differently, we’re designing what’s next.
To learn more, visit www.powerdesigninc.us.
As Platform Engineering Manager at Power Design, you'll lead the buildout of our Platform Engineering function within IT Infrastructure & Operations — transforming a small, operationally focused team into an engineering-led discipline with automation, self-service, and observability at its core. This is a player/coach role: you'll design and automate core infrastructure across our cloud-forward stack (Microsoft Azure, AWS, Oracle Cloud, Egnyte, Workday, Autodesk Construction Cloud) while technically leading and mentoring the engineers around you. You'll own the evaluation and implementation of Power Design's first enterprise AIOps and observability platform, set architectural standards, and partner with cross-functional teams as the function matures. The ideal candidate challenges the on-premises default, evaluates infrastructure decisions through a cloud-first lens, and has the hands-on experience to execute on that vision.
Position Responsibilities
- Design, build, and maintain automation for infrastructure provisioning, configuration, and lifecycle management — with security controls built in from the start.
- Lead the evaluation, selection, and implementation of Power Design's first enterprise observability and AIOps platform, owning the decision end-to-end from vendor assessment through production rollout.
- Develop and maintain observability tooling, dashboards, and automated remediation workflows covering metrics, logging, tracing, and alerting across cloud and on-premises environments.
- Build and enforce CI/CD pipelines for infrastructure and platform services using GitOps best practices.
- Continuously evaluate the infrastructure footprint and identify workloads where cloud migration would improve resilience, reduce complexity, or lower cost — and build the business case to act on it.
- Apply a security-first lens to every platform decision, including IAM/RBAC design, secrets management, Zero Trust implementation (Zscaler), and policy-as-code.
- Create self-service infrastructure workflows — provisioning automation, access workflows, and internal developer tooling — to reduce ticket volume and enable engineering teams to move faster.
- Leverage AI-assisted tooling for anomaly detection, event correlation, and operational insights to drive a proactive operations model.
- Establish and own design standards, architectural consistency, and IaC strategy across the Platform Engineering function.
- Provide technical leadership and mentorship to platform engineers; run delivery rituals, drive continuous improvement, and help shape hiring as the function grows.
- Serve as the engineering lead for secure onboarding of new enterprise platforms, ensuring network controls, endpoint security, SSO, audit logging, and telemetry are in place from Day 1.
- Collaborate with reliability, network, security, and cross-functional business teams to deliver stable, scalable, and self-service platform capabilities.
- Produce and maintain clear technical documentation, design specifications, architectural standards, and runbooks.
- Demonstrate Power Design's core values through every interaction and project outcome.
- Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field; equivalent professional experience considered.
- Experience: 7–10 years of progressive experience in infrastructure engineering, platform engineering, DevOps, or SRE — with meaningful time in both hands-on implementation and technical leadership.
- Preferred certifications: HashiCorp Terraform Associate, AWS/Azure Solutions Architect, CKA/CKAD, or equivalent cloud or platform engineering certifications.
- Hands-on production experience with at least one major cloud platform (Azure, AWS, GCP, or OCI); breadth across multiple platforms strongly preferred.
- Demonstrated history of evaluating infrastructure decisions through a cloud-first lens, identifying when to leverage cloud services rather than defaulting to on-premises solutions.
- Hands-on expertise with Terraform or a comparable IaC framework; GitOps pipeline experience (GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, GitLab CI, or similar).
- Production experience implementing enterprise observability and AIOps tooling (Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic, Prometheus/Grafana, or equivalent), including anomaly detection, event correlation, and automated remediation workflows.
- Advanced scripting skills in Python, PowerShell, and/or Bash; ability to build self-service platform patterns and reusable automation modules.
- Deep understanding of security best practices, IAM/RBAC, secrets management, Zero Trust principles, and compliance frameworks (SOC 2, CMMC, or similar).
- Experience with enterprise identity platforms (Microsoft Entra ID, Okta, or equivalent) in production hybrid environments.
- Strong working knowledge of TCP/IP, DNS, load balancing, storage, and networking concepts across hybrid cloud environments.
- Experience with SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, and incident response frameworks.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills; able to lead design reviews, translate technical tradeoffs for non-technical stakeholders, and drive alignment across teams.
- Demonstrate and uphold Power Design's core values: integrity, accountability, teamwork, innovation, and growth.
About Us
Power Design is a National Design Build Contractor, focused on innovative construction across multiple trades: electrical, mechanical, plumbing, and systems technologies. Since 1989, we’ve disrupted the industry by putting next-generation ideas to powerful, practical use because we care. We design breakthrough solutions that push the limits of what’s possible by harnessing the collaborative power of our teams to elevate experiences and empower the communities where we live and work. In an industry that tends to look back, we’re building better by staying grounded in our values, dedicated to our unique culture, and supportive of work-life balance – making us built to last. By investing in our people and doing things differently, we’re designing what’s next.
To learn more, visit www.powerdesigninc.us.