Senior Platform Engineer, Data & AI Infrastructure

Durham, NC, New York, NY or Los Angeles, CA

Purpose

We're looking for a DevOps / Cloud Security / Data Infrastructure Engineer who will build, operate, and evolve the cloud infrastructure and data platform that powers McKinney's internal AI and analytics products. You'll own the foundation that enables our data lakehouse — managing pipelines, orchestration, infrastructure-as-code, and platform reliability so that our engineering and data teams can ship fast and with confidence.

You'll work alongside our Applied Emerging Technology (AET) department to operate a modern stack built on AWS, Snowflake, Fivetran, DBT, FastAPI, and Okta (auth0). You'll be hands-on with infrastructure automation, CI/CD, observability, and data pipeline health — from early design through deployment, monitoring, and iteration.

Ideal Candidate

  • You think in systems: pipelines, infrastructure state, observability, and failure modes are your natural vocabulary.
  • You're comfortable owning cloud infrastructure end-to-end, from provisioning to incident response.
  • You have a strong data engineering sensibility. You understand ELT patterns, warehouse architecture, and what makes pipelines reliable and cost-efficient.
  • You automate everything, write infrastructure as code, and treat configuration drift as a bug.
  • You collaborate closely with software engineers, data analysts, and product owners.
  • You're curious about AI infrastructure and excited to support LLM-powered products in production.
  • You have used and are learning to leverage AI-coding assistants ( codex, claude-code, etc. )
  • Networking / cloud security experience

 

Responsibilities

  • Design, build, and maintain cloud infrastructure on AWS using Terraform and GitOps (or comparable) workflows; manage environments (dev, staging, production) with consistency and auditability.
  • Own and operate Snowflake data warehouse infrastructure: virtual warehouse sizing and cost governance, resource monitors, account-level configurations, and integration with Fivetran and/or DBT.
  • Manage and monitor ELT connectors; troubleshoot sync failures, schema drift, and performance issues; coordinate with source system owners on connector changes.
  • Support and extend pipelines: manage job scheduling, run monitoring, model dependencies, and test coverage; work with data practitioners on performance optimization.
  • Operate and harden our dev platform: manage user access, environment variables, secrets, deployment configurations, and platform upgrades.
  • Administer Okta SSO integrations and auth0 across the platform; manage application assignments, SCIM provisioning, and authentication policies.
  • Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines for infrastructure and application code; enforce automated testing, security scanning, and deployment gates.
  • Author and maintain Dockerfiles and container images; manage image lifecycle in a container registry; enforce container security best practices.
  • Establish and maintain observability across the stack: metrics, logs, traces, and alerting for pipelines, APIs, and platform services.
  • Manage secrets, IAM roles, and least-privilege access policies across AWS services; maintain a strong security and compliance posture.
  • Perform capacity planning, cost optimization, and FinOps hygiene across AWS and Snowflake; report on platform spend and efficiency.
  • Document infrastructure architecture, runbooks, and incident postmortems; contribute to disaster recovery and business continuity planning.

 

Qualifications

 

Professional Skills

  • AWS: Strong hands-on experience with core services (EC2, ECS/Fargate, Lambda, RDS, S3, IAM, VPC, CloudWatch, Secrets Manager, ECR, CodeBuild/CodePipeline); experience with cost optimization and tagging strategies.
  • Infrastructure as Code: Terraform (required); GitOps or comparable workflows; experience managing multi-environment infrastructure with state management and module reuse.
  • Snowflake Administration: Virtual warehouse management, resource monitors, role-based access control, data sharing, and cost governance; familiarity with Snowflake architecture (micro-partitions, clustering, caching).
  • Data Pipeline Operations: Hands-on experience operating ELT pipelines (Fivetran or comparable); understanding of connector types, sync modes, and failure recovery patterns.
  • DBT: Experience running and monitoring DBT Cloud or Core jobs; understanding of model dependencies, incremental strategies, and test frameworks.
  • CI/CD: GitHub Actions or equivalent; automated build, test, and deployment pipelines for both application and infrastructure code.
  • Containers: Docker image authoring (multi-stage builds), image scanning, registry management; ECS/Fargate deployment experience.
  • Observability: Experience implementing metrics, logging, and alerting stacks (CloudWatch, Datadog, or comparable); on-call participation and incident response.
  • Security & Identity: IAM least-privilege design, Okta SSO/auth0 administration, secrets management, and security best practices for cloud-native environments.
  • Scripting: Python or comparable for automation, tooling, and operational tasks.

 

Competencies

 

  • Communicates clearly with engineering, data, and product partners; translates infrastructure concerns into business-relevant language.
  • Ownership and accountability; follows through on incidents, changes, and documentation.
  • Reliability-first mindset balanced with a pragmatic approach to speed and iteration.
  • Growth mindset; stays current with cloud and data tooling developments.
  • Uses AI assistants responsibly to accelerate infrastructure work, with critical validation of generated configurations and scripts.

Experience

  • 5+ years of professional DevOps, Platform Engineering, or Data Infrastructure experience.
  • Proven hands-on experience with AWS and Terraform in production environments.
  • Demonstrable experience operating a modern data stack (Snowflake, Fivetran, or DBT in any combination).
  • Experience with container-based deployments and CI/CD automation.
  • Prior work in a small, high-ownership team where you wore multiple infrastructure hats is a strong plus.

Salary Range

Our estimated range for this role is $130-$150k

 

Compensation packages are based on the skill level and experience each candidate brings to their role. There may also be a more senior or junior position available that could be a better fit with your expertise. Each level has its own compensation range.

 

We pride ourselves on competitive salaries, and ensuring pay equity exists across our organization. We benchmark each position against existing employee competencies and 4As compensation data which includes geographic and agency size benchmarks. We also meet with department leaders 3x/year to ensure we are supporting employees in living into their full potential.  Our promotions are not limited to a specific time per year. Promotions are tied to performance.  

 

Right To Work In The US

You must be authorized to work in the US for any employer. At this time, we are not sponsoring or providing assistance with obtaining work authorization.

 

McKinney is a place where everyone can grow. Studies have shown that marginalized communities  such as women, LGBTQ+ and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. However you identify, and whatever background you bring with you, please apply if this is a role that would make you excited to come into work every day.

 

We are in the office Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday on a hybrid schedule. We look forward to meeting you!

 

About McKinney 

McKinney is a creative agency that gets unfair attention for brands. In 2024, McKinney was named to Fast Company's Best Workplaces for Innovators list, as well as Ad Age's A-List and its list of Best Places to Work (2024 and 2025), reinforcing the agency's commitment to providing an exceptional workplace culture where employees thrive, and creativity flourishes. McKinney Health, the agency's Pharma and Wellness practice, launched in 2022, was named to MM+M Magazine's 2024 Agency 100 list. A Certified B Corporation, McKinney is part of the Cheil Worldwide network and has offices across the country, including Durham, New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, Phoenix, and Toronto. McKinney has been recognized by Cannes Lions, Effies, The One Show, D&AD, ANDY, CLIO, LIA, the Shortys, and The Webby Awards, among others. Client partners include brands such as Popeyes, Blue Diamond Growers, Little Caesars, Pampers, Henkel, Samsung, Indivior, Sherwin-Williams, Biogen and the Ad Council. For more information, visit mckinney.com.

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