About DNAstack

At DNAstack, our mission is to power precision medicine by building software that breaks down barriers to responsible biomedical data sharing, discovery, and analysis. We build cutting-edge software and industry standards to help researchers and clinicians analyze sequencing data and make faster, more accurate diagnoses. Our platform supports national and international networks tackling rare disease, cancer, infectious disease, and more.

We’re a nimble, cross-functional team of scientists, engineers, designers, and product thinkers working at the intersection of genomics, software, and cloud technologies. Our mission is ambitious, and so is our team.

The Role

The Platform Engineering Lead sets the direction for the team behind the infrastructure our engineers and customers depend on: GCP and AWS environments, Kubernetes, Terraform and Helm, CI/CD, security and the tooling around them.

This is a player-coach role. You lead the team and stay hands-on: you review code, shape architecture and step in on implementation where it matters. You will own four things: the growth of the people on the team, the team's priorities, the platform roadmap (planned with Product), and the platform's technical direction.

What We Look For in a Lead

- Direction first. Clear, ranked priorities, and a reasoned "not yet" or "no".
- Shared ownership. Knowledge, on-call and decisions belong to the whole team, and we learn in the open.
- Technical credibility. You can read a Terraform plan, review a pull request and challenge an architecture proposal, and your feedback makes people better.
- Honest trade-offs. You make the cost and risk of every choice visible to the team, to Product and to leadership,



including the case for more investment when the work calls for it.

What You’ll Do

Lead the team

- Manage and grow the team through 1:1s, career conversations, growth plans, performance reviews and hiring.
- Own the team's rituals, including planning, retrospectives and incident reviews.
- Build shared ownership with primary and secondary owners, pairing, shared on-call and written decisions.
- Coach senior engineers and build a culture of individual empowerment, accountability, and collaboration.

Set priorities and the roadmap

- Keep one ranked list of priorities that everyone can see. Triage requests from Product, Program Management and customers against it, and decide what the team defers or stops.
- Plan the platform roadmap with Product, so reliability, security, tooling and customer environments are planned alongside product features.
- Report progress, risks and spend to the VP of Product Development and the leadership team.

Set technical direction

- Set the direction of the platform and decide how technical decisions are made, documented and revisited.
- Guide architecture and stay hands-on through design reviews, code reviews and implementation.
- Settle technical trade-offs across teams and review major changes, including new customer deployments, for cost and risk.

Make every engineer faster





- Define how we measure delivery, including deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, time to restore and build and test durations, and act on what the numbers show.
- Set direction for the path from commit to production: fast, reliable CI, preview environments with representative genomic test data, and safe, routine deployments with progressive rollouts and automated rollback.
- Use AI and deterministic automation to give a small team leverage, with guardrails for agent access and KPIs that track time saved. Own the platform for AI-assisted development: tooling, access, licensing and budget.

Own cost, reliability and security

- Own the infrastructure budget across GCP, AWS and related tooling: forecast, track against plan and explain variances. Build cost visibility per environment, customer and product.
- Set cost targets and manage vendor and licensing relationships, with renewals planned well ahead.
- Own platform reliability: service level objectives for customer-facing environments, a explicit rotation for on-call, deployments, alerts and support requests, incident response and blameless reviews.
- Partner with our Chief Information Officer and Chief Privacy and Security Officer on SOC 2 controls tracked in Drata. You own the technical side: access, secrets, CI and audit evidence.

What We’re Looking For

- 8+ years in DevOps, site reliability or platform engineering, including 3+ years managing engineers.
- Experience setting technical direction and priorities for a platform or infrastructure team, and managing senior engineers.
- Production experience with Kubernete

📌 Platform Engineering Lead (Toronto)
🏢 DNAstack
📍 Toronto