Senior Platform Engineer

Saatchi & Saatchi Canada is currently opening a new Senior Platform Engineer position to support an innovative AI initiative.

This role is part of a growing team with an immediate start date. We are seeking a candidate with a minimum of 6 years of experience in cloud infrastructure and DevOps practices, who is passionate about automation, reliability, and enabling development teams to deliver value efficiently. A strong understanding of security, scalability, and operational excellence is essential.

Own the platform across many concurrent environments (dev, sit, staging, sandbox, live-preview, prod, and chaos) - provisioning, configuration, scaling, and recovery.

Manage Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) at production scale: node pools, autoscaling, HPA tuning, PDBs, blue-green and rolling cluster migrations, and Cloud NAT / private node hardening.

Own Terraform across cloud resources (GKE, Cloud SQL, Memorystore, GCS, IAM, networking, Cloud Armor, WIF) - including the judgement calls about blast radius when state and reality diverge.

Build and maintain CI/CD across multiple tiers (frontend, backend, agentic services) on GitHub Actions, including gated deployments, image promotion, and safe rollbacks.

Run live infrastructure changes during high-pressure live events (Builder Nights, client demos, integration partner releases) - communicating intent, status, and risk to the broader team in real time.

Lead incident response on infrastructure issues: triage, mitigate, communicate, post-mortem, and turn the learnings into runbooks and follow-up tickets.

Establish and operate the observability stack - metrics, logs, traces, alerts - so the team finds problems before users do, without drowning in noise.

Implement and enforce security and compliance baselines: secrets management, IAM least-privilege, network segmentation, audit logging, supply-chain hygiene.

Partner with the Dev Lead and application engineers on the application-side reliability concerns (graceful shutdown, retry semantics, capacity planning) so the platform and the apps share the same operational contract.

Write down what you know - runbooks, decision logs, environment maps, on-call guides - so the next platform engineer can read in instead of starting over.

You enjoy chaos. Live events, unpredictable load, and infrastructure surprises are why you took this kind of job - not what makes you want to leave it.

Strong written and verbal communication. You narrate decisions in real time, write clear status updates while things are on fire, and explain trade-offs to non-infra people without condescension.

Calm, deliberate decision-making under pressure - especially around irreversible or high-blast-radius changes.

Clear ownership instincts - you can say 'I've got this' and follow through, and you can say 'this isn't mine' and explain why.

Generous documentation habit - you leave the platform more legible than you found it.

Pragmatic - you reach for the boring, well-understood solution before the novel one.

Comfortable disagreeing with engineers, leads, and stakeholders when you see a real risk; respectful when you do.

Nice to Have

Prior experience inside Publicis Groupe or another large holding-company agency environment.