Manager, Platform Engineering

UFG is hiring for a Manager of Platform Engineering who will be responsible for the design, reliability, and operational excellence of UFG’s core infrastructure platforms, including networking, compute, storage, data containers, and cloud infrastructure services. This role leads a team of engineers who build and maintain these foundational systems that support the organization’s enterprise applications and data platforms.

Reporting to the Director of Infrastructure and Operations, this manager provides both strategic and tactical leadership to ensure that infrastructure platforms are modern, secure, cost-effective, and scalable to meet current and future business demands. The role requires deep collaboration with peer teams in application engineering, production operations, DevOps, cybersecurity, and enterprise architecture to deliver resilient, high-performing platforms that serve the needs of a regulated, enterprise-scale environment.

The ideal candidate is a technically grounded leader with broad distributed systems expertise who thrives in hybrid environments, brings operational discipline, and can lead high-performing teams through both modernization and day-to-day reliability efforts.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities: 

Team Leadership and Operations 

• Lead a team of infrastructure engineers responsible for the enterprise’s compute, storage, network, data container, and cloud platform services.
• Provide day-to-day oversight, coaching, and performance development for engineering staff, ensuring team capabilities align with organizational needs.
• Establish team objectives, manage resource allocation, and support staff development to promote technical growth and operational excellence.

Infrastructure Ownership and Reliability 

• Own the lifecycle management of physical and virtual infrastructure, including server environments, storage arrays, hypervisors, and networking components.
• Ensure high availability, security, and performance of infrastructure services through proactive monitoring, automation, and capacity planning.
• Lead platform health initiatives, including patching, upgrades, performance tuning, and infrastructure right-sizing.
• Work with Enterprise Architecture to design a forward-looking hybrid architecture, suitable for supporting the evolving needs of the UFG application stack.

Cloud and Container Platforms 

• Oversee hybrid cloud infrastructure operations, with a focus on IaaS, PaaS, and container platforms.
• Develop team expertise in AWS and Azure.
• Partner with DevOps on the design and implementation of orchestration and control-plane systems that manage the entire technology stack across on-prem and into the cloud.
• Manage cloud tenancy configurations, landing zones, and resource controls in coordination with enterprise cloud governance teams.
• Promote infrastructure-as-code (IaC) and config-as-code practices for repeatability, automation, and governance across environments.

Networking and Connectivity 

• Manage enterprise networking services including routing, switching, load balancing, DNS/DHCP, VPNs, and firewall integration.
• Ensure secure and reliable connectivity across datacenters, cloud environments, branch offices, and remote endpoints.
• Support troubleshooting and optimization of network infrastructure in partnership with security and operations teams.
• Maintain vendor partnerships to assist UFG in engineering and deploying changes to the network environment.

Collaboration and Integration 

• Partner closely with application engineering, DevOps, and production operations teams to ensure platforms meet availability, performance, and supportability goals.
• Provide infrastructure support for enterprise deployments, migrations, and production cutovers.
• Participate in incident response and root cause analysis processes as an escalation point for infrastructure-related issues.

Standards, Governance, and Vendor Management 

• Maintain and enforce platform engineering standards, documentation, and operational runbooks.
• Support vendor selection, contract reviews, and third-party service delivery for platform components.
• Align infrastructure practices with enterprise governance, security, and compliance requirements (e.g., SOX, NIST, CIS benchmarks).
• Support the work of UFG’s governance and internal audit teams in protecting enterprise data and supporting external audit processes.

Data Containers and Virtualization 

• Oversee the deployment, scaling, and management of data container platforms (SQL Server and Cloudbase, among others) used to support modern, distributed application and data workloads.
• Ensure the reliability, performance, and security of containerized environments, including orchestration, registry management, and runtime policies.
• Manage and support data virtualization engines, currently Delphix, that provide unified access to distributed data sources, enabling real-time integration and analytics without data replication.
• Collaborate with application and data teams to ensure containerized data services and virtualization layers are optimized for performance, access control, and operational support.
• Define and maintain configuration standards, monitoring practices, and automation pipelines specific to containerized data platforms and virtualized data access infrastructure.

Job Specifications: 

Education: 

• Bachelor’s degree in information technology, Computer Science, MIS, or equivalent work experience in an enterprise technology environment.

Certifications/Designations: 

• While no certifications are specifically required for this position, the employee is expected to remain up-to-date with changes in technology and enterprise-level management, particularly as they are relevant to the insurance industry. Some certifications that might be useful include:
  • VMware Certified Professional
  • Microsoft Certified: Windows Server Hybrid Administrator Associate
  • AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
  • Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate
  • Microsoft Certified: Azure Database Administrator Associate
  • Couchbase Certified Associate or Professional
  • Delphix Data Platform Administrator Certification

Experience: 

• At least 10+ years supporting computer systems at scale in server and end-user environments.
• At least 6+ years supporting enterprise-scale server environments in both on-prem and cloud environments.
• At least 2+ years in a supervisory role.

Working Conditions: 

• General Office Environment.
• This position may handle off-hour and emergency escalations.
• Up to 5% travel which may include overnight stays.

Pay Transparency Statement: 

UFG Insurance is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices. The base salary range for this position is $123,000 - $145,000 annually, which represents the typical range for new hires in this role. Individual pay within this range will be determined based on a variety of factors, including relevant experience, education, certifications, skills, internal equity, geography and market data.  

In addition to base salary, UFG Insurance offers a comprehensive total rewards package that includes: 

• Annual incentive compensation
• Medical, dental, vision & life insurance
• Accident, critical Illness & short-term disability insurance
• Retirement plans with employer contributions
• Generous time-off program
• Programs designed to support the employee well-being and financial security.

This pay range disclosure is provided in accordance with applicable state and local pay transparency laws.