Senior Manager, Platform Engineering

Senior Manager, Platform Engineering

Toronto, ON (Hybrid)

Reports to: Director, Enterprise Architecture

About this Role

Rates.ca is scaling a multi-platform, regulated digital ecosystem across insurance, money, and content. As engineering scale increases, platform quality becomes the multiplier for delivery speed, reliability, and security.

The Senior Manager, Platform & Cloud Engineering will:

• Make the right path the easy path for software engineers
• Reduce cognitive load and operational friction for product teams
• Standardize cloud, CI/CD, and infrastructure foundations
• Ensure platforms are secure, reliable, cost-efficient, and AI-ready
• Enable scale without reorgs or platform sprawl

What You Will Lead

• Platform Engineers
• Shared delivery foundations used by all product teams
• Cloud standards across AWS (serverless + managed services) and legacy workloads on Akamai/Linode
• CI/CD, IaC, observability, and runtime guardrails
• Own Cloudflare as a first-class platform for CDN, edge delivery, workers, DNS, SSL/TLS, traffic routing policies, WAF, bot management, rate limiting, DDoS protection, and traffic anomaly mitigation
• Platform evolution in partnership with Software Engineering, Security, and Ops

Core Responsibilities

Platform-as-a-Product Leadership

• Treat internal platforms as products with clear consumers, roadmaps, and success metrics
• Define and evolve standard paths for:
• CI/CD
• Infrastructure-as-Code
• Logging, monitoring, and alerting
• Runtime configuration and secrets
• Reduce developer friction by eliminating bespoke setups and manual processes

Cloud & Infrastructure Engineering

• Own cloud architecture and standards across AWS, including serverless and managed services
• Drive modernization away from tightly coupled or manually operated infrastructure
• Ensure infrastructure is scalable, resilient, and cost-aware by default
• Partner with Security to embed compliance and guardrails at the platform level

Reliability, Cost & Operational Enablement

• Reduce platform-caused incidents through standardization and automation
• Embed FinOps principles into platform design (cost visibility, right-sizing, usage controls)
• Ensure platforms support operational excellence without burdening delivery teams
• Collaboration with Engineering Operations on incident prevention and recovery readiness

AI-Augmented Platform Engineering

Platform Engineering at Rates.ca is AI-enabled by design.

You are expected to:

• Enable enterprise-approved AI tooling as part of the developer platform:
• AI-assisted CI/CD diagnostics
• Test generation and pipeline explanation
• Infrastructure drift and anomaly analysis
• Use AI to:
• Reduce operational toil
• Improve signal-to-noise in alerts and logs
• Accelerate root-cause analysis
• Ensure AI capabilities are:
• Governed (identity, access, auditability)
• Secure (no data leakage)
• Measurable for ROI and risk

AI accelerates platform insight — humans remain accountable for decisions.

OKRs & KPIs (Performance-Critical)

Primary OKR Ownership

Increase platform leverage and reduce cognitive load on product teams

KPIs You Own (Trend-Based)

• Platform adoption rate of standard paths
• Infrastructure and environment provisioning time
• Platform-caused incident trend
• Cloud cost efficiency (cost vs usage/output)
• Developer satisfaction with platform experience (qualitative + quantitative)

AI-Related Outcomes

• Reduced manual operational work
• Faster diagnosis of pipeline and infrastructure failures
• No increase in security or compliance findings due to AI usage

Improving these trends over time is a core performance expectation.

What You Bring

• 12+ years in platform, cloud, or infrastructure engineering
• Proven experience leading senior engineers and/or managers
• Strong hands-on background with AWS cloud services, including serverless patterns
• Deep experience with Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform or equivalent)
• Strong CI/CD expertise (GitLab-based or equivalent)
• Experience operating in high-availability, regulated environments
• Experience supporting mixed environments (cloud-native + legacy workloads)
• Observability expertise (metrics, logs, traces; tools like Datadog)
• Containerization experience (Docker/Kubernetes)
• Familiarity with edge delivery patterns (e.g., CDN-backed or serverless frontends)
• Experience enabling or governing AI-assisted developer platforms

Why Join Us?

We’re a team of curious minds who love to learn, build, and grow together. We value transparency, ownership, and continuous improvement. You’ll have the freedom to innovate and the support to thrive.

Ready to build the future with us?

Apply now or message us directly to learn more!

Our Perks

• You get your Birthday off!
• This role requires two in‑office days per week (Tuesday and Thursday), with an additional Wednesday in the office every other week
• 4 weeks of 'Work from Anywhere Program' every year
• Full employer-paid benefits
• RRSP Matching Program with Wealthsimple
• Annual holiday festivities, free lunches and so much more
• Helping you help others with our paid volunteer programs
• Employee satisfaction survey for you to voice your opinion on working at Rates.ca Group Ltd.
• Free access to LinkedIn Learning
• Lounge and games room - ping-pong, pool, foosball, and more!

The compensation package consists of a competitive salary, benefits, and an incentive bonus.

Find out what it is like working at Rates.ca here:
https://corporate.rates.ca/

Check out the primary brands that we work on here:
https://corporate.rates.ca/#brand-snippet-ratesdotca

Rates.ca Group Ltd. and its subsidiaries are committed to being an Equal Opportunity Employer. We provide equal opportunity to all qualified individuals regardless of race, color, religion, age, gender, gender expression, national origin, veteran status, disability or any other legally protected categories such as sexual orientation. We believe that diversity, equity and inclusion are critical to our mission - creating a foundation for a creative workplace that leads to innovation and growth. We value diversity and strive to create an inclusive, accessible workplace where all individuals feel valued, respected, and heard.

We are committed to working with and providing accommodations to candidates and employees with physical or mental disabilities. If you require accommodation in order to search for a job opening or to complete any part of the application or hiring process, please send an email to work@rates.ca.