Infrastructure Platform Team Lead - AWS Kafka, Messaging

Infrastructure Platform Team Lead - AWS Kafka, Messaging

Location: Chicago Metro - Hybrid

Salary Range: $160,000–$185,000 base + bonus

Job Type: Full-Time | Exempt

Benefits: Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, 401(k), PTO

Position Overview

The Infrastructure Platform Team Lead - AWS Kafka, Messaging role will lead the design, development, and support of enterprise messaging and DevOps platforms, including MQ Series , Kafka , and AWS-based services . This role is responsible for ensuring highly available, scalable, and secure communication across distributed applications. The ideal candidate combines technical depth in messaging systems and cloud platforms with strong leadership and collaboration skills to enable seamless DevOps delivery.

You’ll manage a team of platform engineers, partner with infrastructure and development teams, and define strategies that improve performance, resiliency, and developer productivity across the enterprise.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead a team of engineers focused on messaging middleware (MQ Series, Kafka) and cloud infrastructure (AWS).
• Define and execute strategies for the modernization and automation of messaging and DevOps platforms.
• Oversee platform reliability, capacity planning, and system performance tuning.
• Collaborate with software development, security, and infrastructure teams to ensure smooth integration of messaging services and CI/CD pipelines.
• Manage and optimize AWS environments, focusing on scalability, monitoring, and cost control.
• Develop and enforce best practices for infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation, Ansible).
• Ensure compliance with enterprise standards, governance, and audit requirements.
• Provide mentorship, career development, and leadership to a team of platform engineers.
• Establish KPIs for platform health, availability, and developer experience.
• Stay current with industry trends in DevOps, messaging, and cloud technologies to guide future platform evolution.

Qualifications

• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent practical experience).
• Experience: 7–10 years in platform engineering, DevOps, or infrastructure roles; 2–3 years in a leadership capacity.
• Technical Expertise:
  • Strong experience managing IBM MQ Series and Apache Kafka in enterprise-scale environments.
  • Deep understanding of AWS architecture and services (EC2, Lambda, EKS, S3, RDS, CloudWatch).
  • Proven experience building CI/CD pipelines and integrating with tools like Jenkins, GitLab CI, or GitHub Actions.
  • Expertise in Infrastructure as Code using Terraform and Ansible .
  • Familiarity with containerization (Docker, Kubernetes) and observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK).
• Soft Skills: Strong communication and stakeholder management skills; ability to translate technical initiatives into business value; track record of team leadership and cross-functional collaboration.

Preferred Skills

• Prior experience in larger enterprise organizations, or other regulated industries.
• Experience implementing messaging modernization or cloud migration initiatives.
• Certification in AWS, Kafka, or DevOps (AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Confluent Certified Developer, etc.).

Why Join

• Play a hands-on leadership role in modernizing a critical messaging and DevOps infrastructure.
• Influence platform strategy across a large enterprise technology ecosystem.
• Collaborate with talented teams in a culture that values innovation, autonomy, and continuous improvement.