Principal Platform Engineer
First Resonance4 months ago
Base Salary
$170k - $210k/yr
Responsibilities
- Own and evolve backend and platform architecture at scale.
- Establish and improve reliability practices, including SLOs/SLIs, incident response, postmortems, on-call effectiveness, and capacity planning.
- Identify and address systemic performance bottlenecks across databases, APIs, caching, asynchronous processing, and observability.
- Review infrastructure proposals and incoming internal or vendor-driven changes to reduce technical risk.
- Create reusable libraries, patterns, tooling, platform services, and other primitives for product and forward-deployed teams.
- Improve monitoring, alerting, dashboards, deployment safety, and rollback strategies.
- Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar for architecture, operational maturity, and execution.
- Partner with Product, Security, and field-deployed engineers on platform durability and customer needs.
- Deliver a prioritized platform assessment, hardening plan, scaling roadmap, and at least one high-impact reliability, performance, or developer-velocity initiative during the first 90 days.
Requirements
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant ownership of backend or platform systems in production.
- Experience building and operating high-availability, high-uptime services, including incident response and postmortem practices.
- Strong systems knowledge spanning distributed systems, databases, caching, queues, APIs, and cloud infrastructure.
- Track record of leading large technical initiatives across teams or complex codebases.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills with the ability to explain tradeoffs and drive alignment.
- Preferred: prior Staff or Principal Engineer experience, or equivalent scope, at a high-scale infrastructure organization.
- Preferred: depth in SRE or reliability engineering, performance engineering, database scalability, multi-tenant architectures, or zero-downtime migrations.
- Preferred: experience building internal platforms, tooling, CI/CD, shared services, or paved roads for engineers.
- Preferred: experience in or affinity for manufacturing, industrial software, or hard-tech customer environments.
Benefits
- Health, medical, vision, dental, and life insurance.
- Paid parental leave.
- Employee stock option plan.
- Team outings, group lunches, open office, and happy hours.
- Paid holidays and sick days.
- Flexible Friday and paid time off.
- 401(k).