Principal Platform Engineer

About the role

This is a hands-on engineering and technical leadership position. You will move fluidly between building production infrastructure, architecting multi-tenant isolation, designing pipeline and policy enforcement, leading strategic architecture decisions, and mentoring engineers. Your success is measured by what every product inherits: a compounding system that outlasts your direct involvement.

What You'll Do

Platform Architecture & Infrastructure Engineering

- Drive the platform's architecture and runtime direction, including convergence onto one container-orchestrated runtime, tenancy-grade isolation between client engagements, and the contracts every product inherits.

- Design composable infrastructure as code at fleet scale, with clear input contracts and state boundaries, published as versioned templates and images for every core component.

- Make the environment lifecycle a one-command operation: created by merging a pull request, destroyed by deleting it, with automated proof nothing is left behind.

- Design identity and network as a federated, credential-free system — one identity per engagement, just-in-time audited privileged access, separate internal and external edges.

- Ship telemetry and cost visibility out of the box for every service: standard alerting, service-level objectives on live data, fault injection, and per-engagement cost attribution including AI spend.

Delivery Pipelines, Security & Compliance Engineering

- Drive the shared delivery pipelines every product runs through, and the pluggable gate framework that quality, security, and AI-governance checks plug into with block-on-fail enforcement.

- Implement security and compliance as code: release-blocking scanning on every repository, policy and admission control, signed and attested artifacts, and an audit trail and software bill of materials, including AI components, on every build as SOC2 / ISO 27001 evidence.

- Package the AI-assisted development environment as a versioned, first-class deliverable, and enforce the sandbox boundary for coding agents: default-deny egress, short-lived credentials, isolated shared runners.

- Run the platform as a product measured by developer outcomes — setup time, time to first commit, pipeline duration, gate false-positive rate, adoption — pruning or redesigning controls when governance burden outgrows benefit, and proving every golden path by shipping through it yourself.

Technical Leadership & Stakeholder Influence

- Lead the platform's strategic architecture decisions — multi-tenancy, cloud posture, identity provider, network edge — as evidence-based decision documents with real trade-offs, and own the security and reliability evidence the program reports against.

- Serve as a go-to technical authority on platform architecture and delivery engineering, consulted by senior stakeholders at the design and strategy stages, translating trade-offs and platform risk into actionable guidance, and mentoring engineers and vendor partners with observable improvement in design quality and production readiness.