Senior Platform Engineer II – Server Image Bakery
Who We Are
Join a team that puts its People First! Since 1889, First American (NYSE: FAF) has held an unwavering belief in its people. They are passionate about what they do, and we are equally passionate about fostering an environment where all feel welcome, supported, and empowered to be innovative and reach their full potential. Our inclusive, people-first culture has earned our company numerous accolades, including being named to the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For® list for eleven consecutive years. We have also earned awards as a best place to work for women, diversity and LGBTQ+ employees, and have been included on more than 50 regional best places to work lists. First American will always strive to be a great place to work, for all. For more information, please visit www.careers.firstam.com.What We Do
First American is seeking a Senior Platform Engineer II to help drive the evolution of our cloud platform capabilities in support of highly scalable, secure, and AI-enabled systems.As a Senior Platform Engineer II, you will autonomously deliver platform capabilities that enable organizational productivity, architecting solutions that balance reliability, performance, cost, and security. You will lead complex initiatives, establish engineering best practices, and play a critical role in enabling AI-driven and agentic development workflows across the enterprise.
This role will primarily support our Bakery team, partnering closely with engineers and product stakeholders to enable secure, scalable platform capabilities that accelerate delivery. While Bakery will be your primary focus, you will also have opportunities to contribute to broader platform initiatives across the organization where your expertise can drive meaningful impact.
Our organization is deeply focused on advancing AI-assisted and AI-agentic development models. You will help design and build infrastructure, automation frameworks, and governance controls that allow teams to safely and securely leverage AI-powered systems in production.
You will architect solutions that support multiple teams and systems, lead complex incident investigations, and drive improvements in reliability, observability, and resilience. You’ll establish best practices for infrastructure automation and platform standards, while influencing cross-team alignment and enabling consistent, scalable engineering outcomes.
As a technical leader within the Bakery team, you will mentor engineers, provide architectural guidance, and help shape the team’s technical direction and culture. You are comfortable operating in ambiguous environments, making independent technical decisions, and guiding others through complex challenges while remaining hands-on.
This role is well-suited for a senior engineer who is interested in growing into broader technical or people leadership responsibilities over time, while remaining hands-on and deeply technical.
*We are open to remote candidates for this role
What You’ll Do
Architect & Deliver Platform Capabilities
Architect and implement complex cloud infrastructure and platform solutions that support multiple teams and systems
Design infrastructure solutions that balance reliability, performance, cost, and security
Establish patterns for infrastructure automation across teams
Design self-service platform capabilities that increase developer productivity
Architect scalable environments supporting AI workloads, and agentic systems
Take ownership of key platform components supporting the Bakery team and ensure their long-term reliability and evolution
Provide technical direction within the team, helping prioritize infrastructure investments and improvements
Enable AI Agentic Development at Scale
Design secure, scalable infrastructure patterns to support AI-driven development workflows
Establish guardrails, governance, and observability standards for AI-assisted and agent-based systems
Partner with application and data teams to enable model deployment, orchestration, and lifecycle management
Build automation frameworks that reduce toil and allow AI systems to safely execute operational tasks
Drive Reliability, Quality & Resilience
Lead complex incident investigations across multiple systems
Architect solutions that prevent recurring issues across systems
Establish patterns for effective incident response and recovery
Improve observability, monitoring, and resilience testing practices
Drive root cause analysis practices that produce lasting system improvements
Influence & Cross-Team Leadership
Build deep cross-functional relationships and drive coordination across teams
Influence architectural and technology decisions beyond your immediate team
Establish best practices that improve engineering efficiency across the organization
Serve as a go-to technical leader within the Bakery team, helping unblock engineers and provide architectural clarity
Partner with your manager to help set the technical tone and direction of the team
Mentor & Elevate Engineering Craft
Actively coach and mentor engineers across teams
Lead knowledge-sharing sessions on infrastructure and AI platform topics
Establish patterns for infrastructure testing and validation
Foster a culture of resilience, continuous improvement, and responsible AI adoption
Provide thoughtful feedback in code reviews and design discussions
What You’ll Bring
7+ years of experience in platform, infrastructure, or cloud engineering
Proven experience architecting and implementing complex infrastructure systems
Experience leading cross-team initiatives with organizational impact
Experience designing infrastructure solutions with ambiguity and open-ended requirements
Practical experience supporting or enabling AI-driven systems, ML infrastructure, or AI-assisted development workflows
Experience leading projects or serving as a technical lead for small teams or initiatives
Technical Expertise
Deep expertise in cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP)
Advanced proficiency in Infrastructure-as-Code and automation tooling (Terraform, Ansible)
Strong experience designing and operating CI/CD pipelines
Expertise in observability, monitoring, and incident response frameworks
Experience with containerization and orchestration platforms (Docker, Kubernetes)
Strong understanding of distributed systems and infrastructure at scale
Familiarity with LLM-assisted coding tools and models (e.g., Cursor/Copilot, and Claude/GPT) and their secure use in dev/CI workflows.
Ability to evaluate build vs buy decisions for platform components
AI-Focused Capabilities (Highly Valued)
Experience integrating AI tooling into developer workflows
Understanding of patterns supporting LLMs, agentic orchestration, or ML model hosting
Familiarity with governance, compliance, and risk considerations in AI-enabled systems
Experience leveraging AI to reduce operational toil and improve engineering throughput
Why This Role Matters
This role sits at a critical intersection of:
Platform engineering maturity
Enterprise AI transformation
Organizational productivity enablement
Technical leadership within the Bakery team
This hiring range is a reasonable estimate of the base pay range for this position at the time of posting. Pay is based on a number of factors which may include job-related knowledge, skills, experience, business requirements and geographic location.
** Note that the following statements only apply to candidates who will be working from an unincorporated area within Los Angeles County. **
First American will consider for employment all qualified applicants, including those with arrest or conviction records, in a manner consistent with the requirements of applicable state and local laws (e.g., the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act).
First American intends to conduct a review of an applicant’s criminal history in connection with a conditional offer. First American reasonably believes that a criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following material job duties for this position potentially resulting in the withdrawal of the conditional offer of employment: handling of confidential, proprietary or trade secret information belonging to First American or its customers, administrating or facilitating financial transactions, and the ability to meet customer-imposed criminal history requirements.
