The Senior Platform Engineer is the architect of the core digital infrastructure that enables cannabis commerce at a national scale. This role designs, builds, and maintains the cloud-native platform that processes billions of dollars in transactions across a fragmented and technically diverse regulatory landscape. The central challenge involves creating a single, cohesive system that can elegantly handle the unique compliance, tax, and reporting rules of dozens of different states. This requires a profound focus on API-first design, a commitment to relentless automation, and an innovative approach to building highly scalable microservices. The engineer in this role directly enables the industry's growth by providing the stable, compliant, and performant technical foundation upon which thousands of cannabis businesses depend. Their work in building resilient architecture ensures that a complex web of cultivators, manufacturers, distributors, and retailers can transact seamlessly and legally, transforming a state-by-state puzzle into a unified commercial ecosystem.
The day begins by reviewing the performance metrics from the platform's Kubernetes clusters running on AWS. An analysis of Prometheus and Grafana dashboards reveals a latency spike in the inventory-reporting microservice that communicates with Washington's state traceability system. The investigation involves tracing the request path through the service mesh to identify a bottleneck in database queries. A plan is formulated to optimize the query and deploy a patch through the automated CI/CD pipeline, ensuring the change is rolled out with zero downtime to the thousands of businesses relying on it for compliance.
Later in the morning, the focus shifts to strategic architecture. A new state, Virginia, is launching its adult-use market, and its specific regulations for product manifests and tax remittance must be integrated into the platform. The Senior Platform Engineer leads a design session to architect a new set of microservices dedicated to Virginia's compliance logic. This involves defining the API contracts, selecting the appropriate AWS services (such as Lambda for event-driven processing and DynamoDB for state-specific data), and writing the Terraform scripts to provision the new infrastructure. This application of innovation ensures the company can enter a new market quickly and compliantly.
The afternoon is dedicated to improving the platform's scalability in preparation for the 4/20 sales holiday, the industry's Black Friday. The engineer analyzes historical traffic patterns to forecast the required capacity. Using this data, they modify the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler configurations in Kubernetes and conduct load tests to validate that the platform can handle a 10x surge in transaction volume. This proactive work on scalability is critical to capturing maximum revenue during peak periods. The process is a testament to the importance of automation in maintaining system health under extreme pressure.
The day concludes with a security-focused task. A new vulnerability has been announced in a common container base image. The engineer uses automation scripts to scan the entire container registry, identify all affected microservices, and trigger the CI/CD pipeline to rebuild and redeploy them with a patched base image. This ensures the platform's security posture remains strong against emerging threats, protecting sensitive client and transactional data. This work underscores the continuous innovation needed to secure a high-value platform.
The Senior Platform Engineer has primary ownership over three operational domains that define the company's technical capabilities:
The Senior Platform Engineer directly influences key business performance metrics through their architectural and automation efforts:
| Impact Area | Strategic Influence |
|---|---|
| Cash | Maximizes revenue by ensuring near-perfect platform uptime and performance during critical high-volume sales periods like 4/20 and Green Wednesday. |
| Profits | Reduces operational expenditure through aggressive automation of infrastructure provisioning, management, and scaling, lowering the total cost of ownership of the AWS environment. |
| Assets | Designs and builds the company's primary intellectual property: a proprietary, multi-state technology platform. The quality of this architecture directly impacts company valuation. |
| Growth | Accelerates market expansion by creating a modular microservices architecture that allows the company to quickly launch in new states by adding specific compliance services. |
| People | Increases developer productivity and satisfaction by providing a world-class, automated platform and CI/CD experience, which helps attract and retain top engineering talent. |
| Products | Enables rapid innovation and the launch of new software products (e.g., analytics, payments, logistics) by providing a stable, scalable, and API-first foundation to build upon. |
| Legal Exposure | Mitigates significant legal risk by architecting systems that enforce strict data isolation between tenants and ensure airtight compliance with state-mandated data reporting. |
| Compliance | Builds the technical guardrails that enforce cannabis regulations at scale, from calculating state-specific taxes to validating transaction limits and generating compliant manifests. |
| Regulatory | Designs a flexible and adaptable architecture that can quickly incorporate new rules and regulations as they are issued by dozens of state cannabis boards. |
Reports To: This position typically reports to the Head of Engineering, Director of Infrastructure, or Chief Technology Officer (CTO).
Similar Roles: For broader market matching, look for opportunities labeled as Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), DevOps Engineer, or Cloud Infrastructure Architect. While these roles share a similar technical skillset, the Senior Platform Engineer in cannabis is distinct in its focus on building an internal platform that must solve complex, industry-specific challenges like multi-state regulatory compliance and integration with government tracking systems. The role blends deep infrastructure knowledge with a product-oriented mindset focused on enabling application developers.
Works Closely With: This position works in close collaboration with Software Engineering Leads to ensure the platform meets their needs, the Head of Product to align on the API roadmap, and the Chief Compliance Officer to translate complex legal text into technical architecture requirements.
Success in this role requires deep expertise with modern cloud-native technologies:
Success in this role is often predicted by experience in other complex, regulated, and high-transaction industries:
The role demands a unique combination of technical and strategic attributes:
These organizations define the technical and regulatory landscape this role operates within:
| Acronym/Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| API | Application Programming Interface. A set of rules and tools for building software and applications, allowing different systems to communicate. |
| AWS | Amazon Web Services. A comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform offering over 200 fully featured services from data centers globally. |
| CI/CD | Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment. The automation of the software build, test, and release process. |
| IaC | Infrastructure as Code. The process of managing and provisioning computer data centers through machine-readable definition files, rather than physical hardware configuration. |
| K8s | Kubernetes. An open-source container orchestration system for automating software deployment, scaling, and management. |
| Metrc | Marijuana Enforcement Tracking Reporting Compliance. The most common state-mandated seed-to-sale software system used for government traceability. |
| Microservices | An architectural style that structures an application as a collection of small, autonomous services modeled around a business domain. |
| Multi-tenancy | An architecture where a single instance of software runs on a server and serves multiple tenants (customers), with data and configuration partitioned. |
| Seed-to-Sale | The process of tracking the entire lifecycle of a cannabis plant from its cultivation (seed) to its final sale to a customer. |
| SLA | Service Level Agreement. A commitment between a service provider and a client regarding specific aspects of the service like quality, availability, and responsibilities. |
| SRE | Site Reliability Engineering. A discipline that incorporates aspects of software engineering and applies them to infrastructure and operations problems. |
| Terraform | An open-source infrastructure as code software tool created by HashiCorp that enables users to define and provision a data center infrastructure using a declarative configuration language. |
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