Lead Platform Engineer
Koalafi · Richmond, VA
$174,000–$236,000from the description
Jul 20, 2026
Richmond, VA
Jul 22, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A people-manager role leading a platform engineering team, balancing direct reports' performance and career development with hands-on technical contribution. Day-to-day work spans building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes and Terraform-based infrastructure, observability tooling, and automation workflows on AWS, while translating architectural direction from a Cloud Architect into executable team delivery. Suits an experienced engineering leader with a background in cloud infrastructure who is comfortable owning both team operations and production engineering work.
Senior level · 7+ years · Remote · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 3,750 people nationally plausibly meet what this posting asks for (computer and information systems managers). range 2,800–4,900
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $178,991 (middle half $141,096–$225,584). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (8)
This role is a formal people manager (owns 1:1s, performance reviews, career development, and team culture) but also carries significant hands-on technical weight — a genuine hybrid. 11-3021 is the primary classification given the explicit management accountability; 15-1252 is the close runner-up given the substantial IC delivery expectations.
The job title is not stated in the posting; the role is described as an 'engineering leader' for the platform engineering team. Advertised seniority is set to Unspecified accordingly.
The 7+ years requirement is scoped to cloud infrastructure/platform engineering specifically, not general software experience — treated as the role-level minimum.
Python and Go are listed as interchangeable options ('Python or Go') for the general-purpose scripting/automation requirement; Python is used as the primary name with Go as the alternative.
AI coding tools (GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude) are listed as examples of a hard-required capability ('hands-on experience using AI coding tools'); the three named tools are treated as interchangeable alternatives for the same requirement.
Istio, RDS/PostgreSQL, AWS Lambda, and prior platform/infrastructure team lead experience all appear under 'Preferred qualifications' and are marked accordingly.
The posting lists two primary office locations (Richmond, VA and Arlington, VA) plus US-wide remote; Richmond, VA CBSA is used as the primary metro.
Observability skills (metrics, logging, distributed tracing, SLO/SLI, alerting) are required but name no specific tool or platform, so they are omitted from the skills list per the no-generic-concepts rule.
Read the full posting
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