Platform & Infrastructure
The people who keep it up.
SRE, Platform, DevOps, Security. The engineers who make everything else possible.
Platform & Infrastructure at Northstack
Our second-largest practice. We hire the senior engineers who make the rest of the engineering organisation possible — Site Reliability Engineers, Platform Engineers, DevOps and Security specialists, and the senior leadership of those functions.
This is a craft area. The candidates worth hiring at Staff or Principal level are scarce, often not actively looking, and reached through relationships rather than databases. The briefing work matters more than most clients initially appreciate — Platform roles are particularly easy to misspecify.
Where we focus
SRE and Platform Engineering — Staff, Principal, and Senior IC roles at firms whose reliability genuinely matters. Consumer fintech, marketplaces, regulated utilities, payment processors. We do not work on platform roles where the underlying systems are trivial.
Security Engineering — application security, infrastructure security, and the senior leadership of security functions. Particularly active at firms that have outgrown ad-hoc security and need to build a function.
Engineering Leadership of platform functions — Heads of Platform, Heads of SRE, Heads of Security, and the small number of VP-level platform leadership roles that get briefed each year.
Who to talk to
Sam Okafor leads Platform & Infra. For any platform engineering brief, Sam is the right first conversation.
A platform & infrastructure brief we should be working on?
Tell us about the role. We'll respond within one working day with a view on what the brief should actually be, where it should sit in the market, and whether it's the kind of work we do well.