Lead Platform Engineer

Cox Automotive is seeking a Lead Platform Engineerto join our team. We are building a next-generation federated GraphQL platform (DriveQ supergraph) that unifies multiple enterprise data domains and powers internal and external products. This role will focus on scaling Apollo Federation infrastructure, enabling multi-tenant routing, and supporting emerging capabilities like contracts, billing, and data analytics. This role provides essential technical ownership of a rapidly evolving ecosystem that includes Snowflake-based transformations, self-service workflows, and emerging containerized execution models.
Beyond individual contribution, the Lead Software Engineer serves as the central point of design leadership, guiding complex design decisions, enforcing engineering standards, and ensuring consistency across solutions. With the current team composition, where existing engineers are strong but not yet operating at a lead level, the absence of this role would create a significant gap in direction, mentorship, and decision-making. This would likely result in fragmented ownership, slower delivery, and increased operational risk.
The role is also pivotal in enabling next-generation capabilities such as AI-driven data quality, lineage, and impact analysis, areas that require cohesive design and cross-team coordination. At the same time, data science and analytics teams are rapidly advancing their own tooling and workflows, increasing the need for strong data engineering leadership to ensure scalability, reliability, and alignment with enterprise standards.
What You'll Do:

• Design and develop federated GraphQL (Apollo) architecture, including schema design, subgraph integration, and supergraph evolution.
• Build and scale Apollo router infrastructure, supporting multi-region deployments, routing, and failover.
• Implement CI/CD pipelines and governance workflows to ensure safe schema evolution and avoid breaking API changes.
• Develop capabilities for multi-tenant routing and Apollo contracts to support external and internal product use cases.
• Contribute to platform-level initiatives such as usage telemetry, billing data capture, and Snowflake integration.
• Partner with data, platform, and product teams to onboard new subgraphs and improve discoverability.
• Lead technical design discussions and mentor junior engineers.

Who You Are:

• Bachelor's degree in a related discipline and 6 years' experience in a related field. The right candidate could also have a different combination, such as a master's degree and 4 years' experience; a Ph.D. and 1 year of experience; or 18 years 'experience in a related field.
• Experience building distributed systems and APIs at scale.
• Proficiency in TypeScript, Java, or Python (Apollo Server / Strawberry or similar frameworks preferred).
• Hands-on experience with cloud-native infrastructure (AWS, ECS/Kubernetes, DNS routing, CI/CD pipelines).
• Strong understanding of API design principles and governance.
• Applicants must currently be authorized to work in the United States for any employer without current or future sponsorship.
• No OPT, CPT, STEM/OPT or visa sponsorship now or in future.Availability for rotational on-call duties outside of standard business hours may be required.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with GraphQL and Apollo Federation
• Familiarity with API gateway / routing layers (e.g., Kong, routers, load balancing)
• Experience with observability, telemetry, and data pipelines (S3, Snowflake)
• Exposure to multi-region architecture and high-availability systems
• Experience working on platform teams or shared infrastructure

USD 134,900.00 - 224,900.00 per year
Compensation:
Compensation includes a base salary in the range of $134,900.00 - $224,900.00. The base salary may vary within the anticipated base pay range based on factors such as the ultimate location of the position and the selected candidate's knowledge, skills, and abilities. Position may be eligible for additional compensation that may include an incentive program.
Benefits:
The Company offers eligible employees the flexibility to take as much vacation with pay as they deem consistent with their duties, the company's needs, and its obligations; seven paid holidays throughout the calendar year; and up to 160 hours of paid wellness annually for their own wellness or that of family members. Employees are also eligible for additional paid time off in the form of bereavement leave, time off to vote, jury duty leave, volunteer time off, military leave, and parental leave.
EOE, including disability/vets