Principal Platform Engineer, Core Platform

Charlie Health•New York, NY

14h•$225,000 - $325,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Charlie Health is a rapidly growing organization dedicated to connecting individuals with life-saving behavioral health treatment through personalized, virtual care. Our mission is to expand access to meaningful care and drive better outcomes. The Core Platform team serves Charlie Health's other engineering teams, focusing on building the patterns, services, and guardrails that enhance speed, safety, and consistency in development. As the Principal Platform Engineer on Core Platform, you will be the technical lead for Charlie Health's AI-Native SDLC initiative, owning critical architecture decisions to enable automated quality checks and AI-driven efficiencies. This role aims to improve velocity and safety by accelerating parts of the development process, enhancing DORA metrics, and increasing the maturity of the engineering organization. This is a technical leadership role without direct reports, where you will set the technical direction, roadmap, and delivery for a team of Staff and Senior Platform Engineers, making key decisions on quality gates and the integration of AI into the development lifecycle, while remaining hands-on.

Requirements

10+ years of software engineering experience, including ownership of platform or distributed systems architecture at company scale. You have designed, operated, and evolved systems that other teams build on
Hands-on experience leading a delivery engineering or developer productivity transformation: CI/CD, progressive delivery (canary, automated rollback), and test strategy at scale, measured with DORA, SPACE, or similar
Experience evolving a large monolith toward services incrementally, and designing the boundaries that made it safe
Experience with skills, MCPs, harnesses, agentic tooling ecosystems, or agent orchestration for software development
A track record of technical leadership without people authority. You have aligned multiple teams behind architectural outcomes and developed senior engineers
Experience owning a team roadmap: intake, prioritization, and delivery planning alongside the architecture work
You build with AI agents as part of your daily work. You write plans that agents can implement, run agents for real delivery, and know where agent output needs human judgment
Experience bringing AI into a team's lifecycle beyond personal use
Proficiency in the stack we run: Python and/or TypeScript services, Postgres, and AWS
Comfort operating production critical-path systems, including on-call, in a regulated environment
Clear, direct communication with engineers, leadership, clinicians, and compliance

Nice To Haves

Auth0 FGA, OpenFGA, or other Zanzibar-style authorization systems in production
Progressive delivery tooling (Argo Rollouts, feature flags, merge queues) and end-to-end frameworks such as Playwright at scale
Remote coding agents (Claude, OpenCode, Cursor background agents, or similar) running in a managed environment
Healthcare data standards (FHIR, HL7v2) and engineering in a HIPAA-regulated environment
Time as a people manager for senior or staff level engineers
Prior work on a platform engineering team
Fluency with domain-driven design or event storming

Responsibilities

Lead the AI-Native SDLC initiative: quality gates and test foundations, automated and progressively delivered releases, and AI-assisted review, measured by DORA, so we accelerate development safely
Own the team's roadmap and intake. Balance incoming platform requests and near-term developer pain against long-term architectural investment, with support from Engineering leadership
Run the team's delivery: planning, refinement, and the cycle cadence, with projects scoped to clear milestones and target dates
Build authentication and authorization for the platform, including agent identity: scoped, short-lived, audited credentials for non-human principals
Shape the gradual decomposition of the monolith into services: define the seams, the migration pattern, and the sequencing, and partner with product squads as domains move
Facilitate the Architecture Advice Guild rituals and provide technical direction on architecture decision records for cross-team decisions and standards
Raise the bar for plan authoring and agent orchestration on the team, and review agent output with the same rigor you would apply to a senior engineer's work
Keep the platform services the team operates reliable: SLOs, monitor-gated deploys, incident leadership, and a seat in the on-call rotation
Drive the technical evaluation for procurement and renewals of our critical platform vendors: evaluations, proofs of concept, usage and cost data, and build versus buy recommendations, partnering with the Director who owns the commercial side
Mentor Staff and Senior engineers toward larger scope