Technical Lead, Platform Engineering

Armstrong Collective is the parent company of Rocky Mountaineer and Canyon Spirit, creating unforgettable rail journeys through some of the most breathtaking landscapes in Western Canada and the American Southwest. Guided by our values—Create Meaningful Moments, Be One Team, and Achieve Extraordinary Outcomes, we show up every day with pride, ownership, and a shared commitment to excellence. We work hard, support one another, embrace new possibilities, and celebrate growth, all in a respectful and inclusive environment where integrity, collaboration, and passion for the guest experience lead the way.

Purpose

The Technical Lead, Platform Engineering reports into the Director, Software Engineering. This position is responsible for leading the assessment, migration, and ongoing architecture of The Armstrong Collective's Azure cloud-native environment - spanning production workloads that need to move into a new resource group and subscription structure, and early-stage applications that require proper design and capacity planning before build. The role owns platform governance, observability, identity, and security across all four Azure subscriptions (Non-Prod, Prod, Global Shared, and Sandbox), and acts as the senior technical authority for cloud infrastructure decisions.

Key Areas of Accountability

Cloud Migration & Architecture

• Audit current production applications, resource groups, and subscription placement.
• Design and execute migration plans into the new subscription/resource-group structure, making sound, fact-based decisions on rollback and cutover procedures even when information is incomplete.
• Partner with product and engineering teams during the ideation phase to right-size architecture, capacity, and scaling strategy, effectively prioritizing competing requests to align with overall business strategy.
• Establish reusable IaC modules, reference architectures, and naming/tagging standards for consistent provisioning across subscriptions.

Platform Engineering & Governance

• Define and enforce subscription strategy and management group structure across Non-Prod, Prod, Global Shared, and Sandbox environments.
• Drive Infrastructure as Code adoption (Bicep or Terraform) across all environments, holding self and the team accountable for consistent standards.
• Design and maintain CI/CD pipelines (Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions) for Functions, App Service, and Static Web Apps deployments.
• Manage cost visibility and optimization across all subscriptions, including Sandbox sprawl control, taking timely and effective action to correct issues before they elevate.

Observability & Operations

• Own observability strategy end-to-end: Azure Monitor, Application Insights, Log Analytics, Dashboards, and Alerts.
• Lead incident response and root cause analysis for platform-level issues, identifying underlying causes rather than symptoms, and drive postmortems that produce lasting fixes.
• Establish and maintain runbooks for migration, deployment, and recovery scenarios, keeping team members and leaders informed by sharing relevant information during incidents.

Identity & Security

• Own identity and access strategy via Microsoft Entra ID for both internal workforce and external/customer-facing authentication, including B2B/B2C considerations.
• Implement network and security boundaries with Azure Front Door, Private Endpoints, and NSGs as appropriate.
• Enforce least-privilege access (RBAC) across all subscriptions, weighing risk and obstacles carefully when making access decisions that affect guest and team member data.

Technical Leadership

• Act as the senior technical voice on DevOps/infrastructure decisions, mentoring engineers and providing timely, specific, and constructive feedback that develops their skills.
• Communicate migration plans, tradeoffs, and platform roadmap clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders, keeping teams and leaders informed and building trust across departments.
• Empower the team by delegating responsibility and monitoring progress, holding self and others accountable for a high level of performance.
• Champion new ideas for emerging AI workloads on Azure AI Foundry, encouraging innovation and supporting the team through change and ambiguity.

Qualifications

Education / Certifications / Knowledge

• Undergraduate degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (desired).
• Azure certifications such as AZ-400 (DevOps Engineer Expert), AZ-104 (Administrator), or AZ-305 (Solutions Architect) (desired).
• Working knowledge of the Azure Cloud Adoption Framework and landing zone design principles (desired).

Experience

• 5+ years' experience in DevOps, Cloud, or Platform Engineering roles.
• 2+ years' experience in a lead or senior technical capacity, including mentoring other engineers.
• Proven experience migrating live production workloads between resource groups/subscriptions with minimal disruption.
• Experience operating multiple Azure subscriptions/landing zones and associated governance patterns (management groups, policy, RBAC).

Skills

• Deep, hands-on Azure expertise: Functions, Event Grid, Event Hub, Service Fabric, Managed Redis, App Service, Static Web Apps, Blob Storage, Front Door.
• Observability tooling: Azure Monitor, Application Insights, Log Analytics, Dashboards, Alerts.
• Identity: Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD) for internal and external/customer authentication.
• Infrastructure as Code (Bicep or Terraform) and CI/CD pipeline ownership (Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions).
• Scripting for automation (PowerShell, Bash, or Python).
• Comfort operating in a serverless/event-driven architecture, reasoning about cost, cold-start, and scaling tradeoffs.
• Familiarity with Azure AI Foundry or other Azure AI/ML services (an asset).

Work Environment

• Must be legally entitled to work in Canada.
• Corporate Office – Vancouver based; hybrid role with a minimum 3 days/week in the office.

Compensation

• The base salary offered for this role is $130,000 to $150,000 per annum and can vary based on job-related expertise, qualifications, experience and internal equity.
• Eligible for Armstrong Collective's discretionary bonus program

Eligible Benefits

Armstrong Collective supports our team members' health and wellness by providing a comprehensive medical plan with 100% employer paid premiums, some of which includes:

• Medical, Dental, Vision, Life Insurance
• Short term disability, long term disability benefits
• Travel emergency assistance
• Vacation time and sick time
• Up to 5% RRSP and/or TSFA match
• Two complimentary annual train tickets after first year of employment

The company is an equal opportunity employer, driven by our values of Creating Meaningful Moments, Being One Team, and Achieving Extraordinary Outcomes. Our strong company culture supports our vision of a diverse, open, safe, and respectful workplace. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all team members. If you require any accommodation during the application process or throughout your employment, please let us know. We will work with you to ensure your needs are met and to create a supportive environment.

Please ensure to opt-in for text messages when you apply to receive interview updates.

This job description is not exhaustive of all duties and will encompass additional duties assigned. Responsibilities, title, reporting structure, and duties may be changed in response to business requirements.

#J-18808-Ljbffr