Lead Platform Engineer

About the Role Join us as a Lead Platform Engineer to shape our core platform, infrastructure, and developer tools that power our products. This role combines hands-on engineering with strategic vision—you’ll design and implement essential systems, define the platform roadmap, and collaborate across engineering teams to build a secure, reliable, and scalable foundation. Reporting directly to the CTO, you will have the autonomy to identify challenges, set the course, and execute solutions independently. Collaborate with engineering managers across PHP, Python, and mobile/web platforms while owning the architectural vision and execution company-wide. Key Responsibilities Design and implement critical backend systems, including payment processing and authentication in the Wag backend application. Create system architectures that span platforms and teams. Develop efficient build and deployment pipelines, containerization (Docker, Gitlab CI/CD), and developer tooling to enhance productivity. Integrate AI-powered solutions to elevate platform quality and developer efficiency. Define and maintain the platform roadmap, considering reliability, productivity, technical debt, and cost. Craft bug detection and triage tooling and procedures. Contribute infrastructure as code using Terraform. Establish and lead incident response protocols, including observability and on-call tooling. Act as a trusted technical owner for key backend systems. Mentor engineers on best practices in infrastructure and platform management. Partner with the Security Manager to ensure platform security and compliance in design. Design the data engineering and analytics platform. Participate in on-call incident response for essential systems. Performance Indicators Code and App Quality: Monitor bug regression rates, app quality, and platform performance. System Reliability: Track uptime and mean time to recovery (MTTR). Velocity Enablers: Measure CI/CD speed and developer productivity metrics. Technical Hygiene: Aim for a reduction in systemic debt and roadmap progress on platform initiatives. Cross-team Alignment: Evaluate the percentage of projects conforming to established standards. Qualifications Willingness to engage directly in both planning and execution with a dedicated team. Extensive experience in backend software development. Familiarity with PHP and Python. Strong expertise in containerization (Docker) and designing CI/CD pipelines. Proficient in cloud infrastructure design and maintenance, preferably in AWS. Expertise with Terraform or similar Infrastructure as Code tools. Demonstrated ability to design reliable systems with minimal oversight. Experience steering cross-team initiatives and influencing technical direction. Solid understanding of reliability engineering, monitoring, and incident management. Exceptional communication skills, facilitating collaboration across multiple engineering teams. The national base pay range for a successful candidate is between $150,000 to $210,000. About Wag! Group Co. Wag! Group Co. aims to be the leading platform for addressing the service, product, and wellness needs of today's U.S. pet households. Since pioneering on-demand dog walking in 2015 with the Wag! app, we have provided access to premium dog walking, sitting, and one-on-one training from a community of over 500,000 pet caregivers nationwide. We also operate Petted, one of the largest pet insurance comparison marketplaces; Dog Food Advisor, a trusted pet food review platform; WoofWoofTV, a multimedia company delivering delightful pet content to over 18 million social media followers; and maxbone, a modern digital platform for pet essentials. For further information, please visit Wag.co.

Created: 2026-03-04