Lead Platform Engineer at Gates Foundation in Seattle, WA

Job description

The Foundation We are the largest nonprofit fighting poverty, disease, and inequity around the world. Founded on a simple premise: people everywhere, regardless of identity or circumstances, should have the chance to live healthy, productive lives. We believe our employees should reflect the rich diversity of the global populations we aim to serve. We provide an exceptional benefits package to employees and their families which include comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage with no premiums, generous paid time off, paid family leave, foundation-paid retirement contribution, regional holidays, and opportunities to engage in several employee communities. As a workplace, we’re committed to creating an environment for you to thrive both personally and professionally. The Team Within Business Operations and the Information Technology (IT) organization, the Enterprise Data Solutions (EDS) team leads work across Knowledge Management, AI, Data Engineering, Business Intelligence, Data Infrastructure, and Health Data Platforms. The team’s vision is to empower the Foundation with innovative, data and AI driven services and solutions that enable timely, informed decision-making. As part of this scope, the EDS team recently launched the Enterprise Data Platform (EDP) - the central hub for managing, analyzing, and sharing the Foundation’s data assets and enabling AI. Your Role As a Lead Platform Engineer, you are an experienced, hands-on technical leader responsible for architecting, delivering, and evolving complex technology solutions that support foundation and affiliate staff around the world. You operate with a high degree of independence, serving as a subject matter expert and acting as a practice lead who contributes to technical execution, builds team capability and mentors engineers. You translate complex organizational and technical problems into actionable, tactical plans, partnering across service teams and being accountable for outcomes—not just deliverables. In this role, you provide technical leadership across multiple platforms and domains, shape solution strategy, contribute to technical execution and guide engineering excellence across the organization. You serve as a trusted advisor to IT leadership and business partners, helping translate long-term organizational needs into scalable, secure, sustainable technology capabilities. You influence architectural direction, coach engineering teams, and ensure the overall health, usability, and reliability of the systems entrusted to your stewardship. Your work directly strengthens the foundation’s ability to operate effectively and advance its mission globally. What You’ll Do Technology & Architecture Leadership Define and evolve multi-year Data and AI platform roadmaps aligned to enterprise architecture, security standards, and business strategies. Work with business leaders globally to understand business needs, translate requirements to meaningful design artifacts and implement data and AI tooling for Enterprise Data Platform (EDP). Implement Data and AI governance controls, data and platform level security best practices as we continue to build out EDP. Provide platform architectural leadership and hands-on development of frameworks (example: Data Classification, data auditing, etc.) on complex, cross-team initiatives, ensuring solutions are scalable, secure, resilient, and maintainable. Lead platform tools, frameworks and vendor evaluations, guiding build vs. buy decisions and ensuring alignment with enterprise technical direction. Develop and promote engineering standards, reference architectures, and data access design patterns used across IT and partner teams. Anticipate technology impacts across applications, data, integrations, and infrastructure—and guide teams through informed trade-off decisions including assessing new technology. Solution Delivery & Continuous Improvement Develop design patterns for developing and governing data and agentic AI applicati