Join Updater’s Platform Engineering team as a Lead Platform Engineer who combines technical excellence and exceptional collaboration skills to deliver impact. You will drive vital initiatives including deployment velocity, observability, system reliability, and developer experience by partnering closely with product pods, project managers, and other stakeholders across the business to understand their workflows and pain points. You'll build the infrastructure and tooling that lets engineers ship faster and sleep better—think GitOps workflows, Kubernetes configuration and optimization, comprehensive Datadog observability coverage, and the kind of automation that makes deployments uneventful. This is platform engineering done right: pragmatic, impactful, and centered on enabling the broader engineering organization.

Responsibilities

Embody a culture of continuous improvement and shared ownership backed by clear documentation, runbooks, and other shift left contributions
Treat platform capabilities as products—gather requirements from development pods, prioritize based on impact, iterate based on feedback, and measure adoption and satisfaction
Build strong, collaborative relationships evidenced by proactive engagement from product teams
Continually improve system reliability and observability coverage
Reduce tooling and config complexity so that engineers spend less time fighting tools and more time building features
Optimize Infrastructure costs without compromising reliability
Reduce time-to-production for new features and services
Ensure reliable, repeatable, and better standardized deployments with minimal manual intervention

Must-Have Skills and Experience

Soft Skills

Excellent cross-functional collaboration abilities beyond traditional IT/ops boundaries—you regularly engage with functions across the business to understand their needs, gather feedback, and champion DevEx improvements. You're as comfortable explaining infrastructure tradeoffs in a product planning meeting as you are debugging a Kubernetes cluster
Ability to communicate effectively to both technical and non-technical audiences alike, and leverages visuals, data, and concise documentation to build shared understanding
Deep empathy for DevEx—you genuinely understand engineer pain points, involve users in design decisions, and measure success by how much you improve their daily work
Positive, team-oriented mindset that treats every day as an opportunity to improve and inspire others through your can-do attitude

Technical

Previous experience on a platform engineering team where you led complex infrastructure or tooling migration efforts and built useful dev-focused tools that required deep understanding of product development workflows, sprint planning, and release cycles across multiple pods
Deep practical experience architecting and implementing solutions in AWS, backed by strong command of cloud design patterns and technologies
Deep expertise in Kubernetes containerized workloads and orchestration
Strong command of observability tools like DataDog or Prometheus
Proficiency in Terraform IaC
Experience in building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines and associated best practices
Solid experience with Git via Gitlab, Github, or Bitbucket.
Familiarity with GitOps tooling like Spacelift or Flux
Strong project management skills that balance interrupt-driven and roadmap work
Eagerness to learn new and evolving technologies in the Platform Engineering ecosystem

Bonus Points For

Frontend or backend development skills
Previous experience as project lead or team lead
Experience working embedded with or closely partnering with product squads/pods in an agile environment
Use of AI tooling to help improve efficiency in your daily work
Previous experience tuning SQL and caching technologies

Compensation

This posting is anticipated to remain open until 2/28/2026 . The new hire salary range for this position is $180,000 - $215,000 annually. Factors which may affect the starting pay within this range include skills, experience, and other qualifications aligned with Updater's internal leveling guidelines.

About Updater

Updater is a leading technology platform helping major brands acquire and retain customers at scale. We are on a mission to power millions of complex transactions through intelligent, autonomous systems. By combining deep integrations, real-world data, and purpose-built AI agents, we’re transforming fragmented purchasing workflows into seamless, automated experiences – freeing businesses and consumers from operational friction and enabling a new standard of speed, accuracy, and scale.

Updater has raised over $450 million from leading investors, including SoftBank Capital, Vista Credit Partners, IA Ventures, Commerce Ventures, Second Century Ventures (the strategic investment arm of the National Association of Realtors®), and more. For more information, please visit www.updater.com.

Updater is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and will consider all qualified applicants regardless of color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital or family status, disability, gender identity or expression, veteran status, actual or presumed belonging to an ethnic group, or any other legally protected status. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.

Benefits: The Company offers the following benefits for this full-time position, subject to applicable eligibility requirements:

Medical, Dental, and Vision Insurance
Flexible PTO
13 paid company holidays annually
Updater Stock Options
401(k) with employer match
Wellbeing Subsidy
One Medical membership
Virtual on-demand healthcare through Teladoc and Talkspace
Flexible spending account (FSA)
Health savings account (HSA)
Supplemental Short & Long Term Disability Insurance
Supplemental Life Insurance
Paid Parental Leave

Lead Platform Engineer

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