Principal Platform Engineer

Principal Platform Engineer

Software Platforms

General Overview

The title centers on platform engineering, but the work spans four competencies: cloud engineering, DevOps, site reliability engineering, and software engineering. Strong candidates are deep in at least one and capable across all four, and they stay hands-on in the code while helping steward the architecture and standards the platform depends on.

The Principal Platform Engineer is a senior individual contributor who builds and operates the platform's core services while helping steward its architecture and standards. Principals take major capabilities from design through production and ongoing operation, shape the golden paths operating companies adopt, and set the technical bar through engineering, code review, and mentorship. The role reports to the Chief Software Platform Officer and partners closely with the Director of Technical Product Management and engineering teams across the operating companies.

Responsibilities

• Build platform capability hands-on: design and ship core platform services end to end, from architecture through production and ongoing operation, as self-service capabilities that operating-company engineers adopt with minimal friction.

• Steward the platform's architecture and standards, shaping the reference architecture, golden paths, and paved roads, and turning engineering standards into executable guidance through the Architecture Council.

• Advance AI-first software delivery by building and evolving the templates, pipelines, and golden paths that raise developer throughput, and help extend the platform into shared services that support new software offerings.

• Own reliability, security, and cost for the services you build: define SLIs and SLOs, instrument observability, run incident response, and reduce toil through automation, with security and cost designed in from the start.

• Set the technical bar and mentor: raise the level of platform and operating-company engineers through hands-on engineering, code review, and mentorship, and help build a connected engineering community across the portfolio.

Qualifications

• Depth. 15+ years across the platform disciplines (platform engineering, cloud, DevOps, SRE, and software engineering), including deep hands-on experience building and operating services consumed by multiple teams or business units.

• Platform engineering. Hands-on experience building internal developer platforms and shared services used by many teams or business units (self-service, golden paths, API versioning and backward compatibility, adoption), with a platform-as-product mindset that treats engineers as customers and reduces their cognitive load.

• Cloud engineering. Strong, current, hands-on expertise on AWS (or Azure/GCP): containers and Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi, or similar), and practical command of networking, identity, security posture, and cost.

• DevOps. Deep hands-on CI/CD and GitOps experience, building and operating delivery pipelines and environment automation, and improving the developer experience of shipping change safely and fast.

• Site reliability engineering. Production-ownership experience: SLIs and SLOs, error budgets, observability, incident response, capacity planning, and toil reduction through automation.

• Software engineering. An excellent engineer with strong design sensibility (API contracts, clean abstractions, separation of concerns) who builds production services as durable products and stays hands-on in the code. Fluent in at least one modern backend language (Go, Python, TypeScript, or similar), with sound build-vs-buy judgment.

• Platform security. Hands-on cloud-native security expertise (IAM, OAuth/OIDC, secrets and workload identity, certificate lifecycle, policy-as-code, and secure software supply chain), with a track record of building secure-by-default platforms.

• Architecture and standards stewardship. A track record of shaping reference architectures, golden paths, and engineering standards that other teams adopt, turning them into executable guidance rather than documentation.

• AI-first delivery. Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development and agentic coding workflows (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or similar), able to define best practices and guardrails and to shape how these tools change delivery, code quality, and team structure.

• Influence and communication. Exceptional written and verbal communication, able to build trust across organizational boundaries, align engineers across operating companies, and mentor without relying on positional authority.

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