Senior Platform Engineer

About DNAstack

DNAstack’s mission is to accelerate precision medicine and research by making complex biomedical data more accessible, interoperable, and actionable. We build innovative software that helps researchers, clinicians, and institutions derive insights and improve health outcomes. We’re proud to support global data sharing and scientific discovery while maintaining a deep commitment to privacy and security. We’re a small but mighty startup team working at the intersection of bioinformatics, cloud computing, and open science.

Role Overview

As a Senior Platform Engineer, you’ll take a leading role in designing, building, and evolving the core infrastructure that powers DNAstack’s genomics software platforms. You’ll be part of a small, high-impact team that ensures our systems are secure, reliable, cost-efficient, and empower developers to move quickly with confidence. This role blends infrastructure engineering, developer productivity, and security-minded systems design. You’ll thrive here if you enjoy building scalable cloud environments, automating everything, and solving complex problems that improve the entire engineering organization.

Responsibilities

Infrastructure & Reliability

• Design, build, and maintain scalable cloud infrastructure to support rapidly growing user workloads.
• Implement consistent and reliable deployment pipelines using GitOps and declarative workflows.
• Establish and monitor SLOs and error budgets to measure reliability and performance.
• Develop disaster recovery strategies and ensure business continuity through backups and redundancy.
  

Developer Platform & Automation

• Build and operate internal developer platforms and self-service tools that reduce friction and increase velocity.
• Lead automation of provisioning, configuration, and “Day 2” operations across GCP, AWS, and Azure cloud environments.
• Manage CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Concourse, and ArgoCD) and optimize build and release processes.
• Identify and eliminate bottlenecks in developer workflows to accelerate delivery across teams.
  
  

Security & Cost Optimization

• Implement and maintain secrets management, IAM/RBAC, vulnerability scanning, and zero-trust practices.
• Partner with security and compliance stakeholders to identify and mitigate infrastructure risks.
• Monitor, forecast, and optimize cloud costs through FinOps principles, tagging, and usage governance.
• Drive initiatives that balance scalability, reliability, and economic efficiency.
  

Collaboration & Innovation

• Partner with engineering teams to define infrastructure requirements, roll out solutions, and ensure best practices.
• Provide mentorship and technical guidance to other engineers, promoting shared ownership of platform systems.
• Contribute to documentation and internal knowledge sharing for repeatable, reliable operations.
• Evaluate emerging tools and technologies, proposing solutions that strengthen DNAstack’s platform strategy.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience in infrastructure, platform engineering, or site reliability engineering.
• Proven ability to design, operate, and scale production systems in cloud environments.
• Strong hands-on experience with Kubernetes, Docker, and Linux systems.
• Expertise with at least one major cloud provider (GCP, AWS, or Azure).
• Proficiency in Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Helm, Pulumi, or similar).
• Experience with CI/CD systems and automation (GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, etc)
• Scripting proficiency (Bash or Python preferred).
• Familiarity with observability stacks (Datadog, Grafana, OpenTelemetry).
• Understanding of networking, load balancing, and service mesh concepts.
• Strong grasp of cloud security best practices, compliance, and data privacy principles.
• Excellent judgment and communication skills, with the ability to influence decisions across teams.
  

Bonus Points

• Experience managing databases or stateful systems (PostgreSQL, Redis, distributed storage, etc.).
• Experience with FinOps, cost forecasting, or cloud spend optimization.
• Experience in regulated or privacy-sensitive domains (e.g. healthcare, genomics, life sciences).

Where You’ll Work

This role offers the flexibility of a hybrid work environment, allowing you to work both remotely and from our Toronto office. This arrangement supports your needs and promotes a healthy work–life balance. To be considered for this position, you must be eligible to work in Canada.

The salary range for this role is $120,000 - $170,000 CAD. At DNAstack, we are dedicated to providing pay transparency to all candidates. Compensation at DNAstack is determined through various factors including but not limited to: comparable salary market data within Canada, technical skill assessment, a holistic view of previous work history, and internal pay equity with other DNAstack team members.

DNAstack is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices. In accordance with the appropriate legislation in each jurisdiction in which we operate, we ensure that our team members are compensated within equal pay ranges for work of equal value, regardless of gender. 

We regularly review our compensation practices to identify and address any pay equity gaps. Our approach considers skill, effort, responsibility, and working conditions to ensure that compensation decisions are objective, transparent, and free from bias.

Pay equity is an ongoing process, and we are committed to maintaining compliance with legislative requirements while fostering a workplace that values fairness, respect, and inclusion.

Benefits

• Remote friendly, with flexible hours and the opportunity to work on-site at our Toronto office.
• Comprehensive health benefits: medical, dental and vision coverage for you and your dependents
• Three weeks vacation
• Unlimited sick days
• Maternity and parental leave top-up programs
• One-time remote office set-up stipend
• Career development and learning support
• Opportunity to participate in DNAstack’s Employee Stock Option Program.

• Opportunity to contribute to open science and global data-sharing efforts.
  

Let’s Talk

If this role sounds like a fit—and you’re excited to help shape the future of genomic medicine—we’d love to hear from you.

At DNAstack, we are committed to building and fostering an inclusive, accessible environment for everyone. If you have any questions, concerns, or requests regarding accessibility needs at any stage of the interview process, please contact  [email protected] and we will work with you to meet your needs.

As a small but mighty team, we use AI-powered tools to help us stay organized and efficient during our hiring processes.  These tools help in areas such as sorting applications and highlighting matches to the role. These tools help us move faster, but they definitely don't make decisions for us -  every application is reviewed by a real human on our team.

Your privacy matters to us. Any information you share is handled according to Ontario privacy laws as well as our internal privacy practices. If you have any questions about how we use AI in our hiring process, please reach out to [email protected].

Note: this posting is for an existing vacancy that we are seeking to fill.

For compliance reasons, all offers of employment at DNAstack are conditional upon a successful background check that may consist of prior employment verification, reference checks, education confirmation, criminal background, or other information, as permitted by law.