Principal Platform Engineer

Coforma•North Bethesda, MD

11d•Remote

About The Position

We are looking for an experienced Principal Platform Engineer to join our internal innovation lab and to help build a state-of-the-art product and developer platform from the ground-up. You'll be a hands-on subject matter expert within an autonomous team exploring new ideas and building products from scratch, ranging from internal prototypes to net-new digital services that may grow into their own offerings. This role will design and ship services and components with a Platform-as-a-Product mindset, while shaping standards for platform reliability, observability, and security in a fast-moving R&D environment. Reporting to our Director of Platform Engineering, you’ll also bring experience in Site Reliability Engineering and DevOps best practices, automating infrastructure and engineering operations, DevSecOps expertise, and pragmatic architecture choices that balance speed of learning with long-term maintainability. This role will be a key voice building the foundational platform for our innovation lab, enabling our teams to quickly test, iterate, and ship new scalable and secure products. The Principal Platform Engineer will contribute to the design of infrastructure, security, tooling, and developer productivity platforms, ensuring that the innovation lab technology foundation is reliable, secure, and a delight for developers and customers to use. As we grow, you will collaborate across departments to promote Platform Engineering and DevSecOps practices, mentor junior engineers, and help drive an in-house Platform function that matches our product and business goals. If you’re passionate about improving lives through digital products and services, then Coforma is a great company for you. $174,399 to $187,006 Annual Salary + Benefits + Growth Potential Placement within this range will be based on the competency level of the candidate. An offer will be made at one of the following tiers: Tier 1 - $174,399.60: Meets stated qualification and experience requirements. May need guidance and training beyond onboarding to perform the more complex functions of the role. Tier 2 - $181,543.68: Experienced and fully competent. Will be able to independently perform key responsibilities of the role once onboarding is completed. Tier 3 - $187,006.80: Highly experienced and can perform all responsibilities of the role at a higher level than expected once onboarding is completed. To honor our company-wide equitable pay system, the posted salary range and corresponding tier salaries are non-negotiable. This is a US-based remote position open to applicants in the states listed below. Some travel may be required. To ensure we remain compliant with all state, county, and local employment and tax regulations, applicants must currently reside in one of the following states to be considered for employment with Coforma. This list will be updated periodically as our PeopleOps team works to open up hiring in additional states. Arizona California District of Columbia Florida Georgia Idaho Illinois Maine Maryland Massachusetts Montana Nevada New Jersey New York North Carolina Oregon South Carolina Tennessee Texas Virginia Washington Wisconsin

Requirements

Minimum of 8 years of experience in Platform Engineering, SRE, and DevOps roles
2+ years of experience in senior and technical lead roles in Engineering teams
Expertise with our core Platform stack: GCP, GitHub, Datadog, Grafana
Experience building containerized platform services (Javascript, Go, Rust, Python)
Experience developing and maintaining internal platform tools for developers, owning SLOs, and championing product performance and velocity
Demonstrated ability to lead incident response, security reviews and remediation, and navigate compliance requirements
Excellent collaboration, communication, and stakeholder management skills
Comfortable with ambiguity and able to support experiments, measure outcomes, and adjust course quickly
Full-time resident of the contiguous United States (must be legally authorized to work in the US now and in the future without sponsorship)
Observability tools such as Grafana, Datadog, OTEL, Prometheus, Sentry, Incident.io
IaC expertise (Terraform, Pulumi)
Containers and orchestration platforms (Docker, Kubernetes), and serverless architectures
Programming or scripting language (Python, JavaScript, Bash, Go, Rust)
SRE principles, DevSecOps, and DevEx improvement practices
Modern CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitHub Actions, Google Cloud Deploy)
Building blocks of the web (HTTP, HTML, CSS, JS/TS, JSON, SSL) and strong first-principles systems engineering foundations
Security and compliance implications (SOC 2, HIPAA) for SaaS-style or licensed products, and can design with them in mind

Nice To Haves

High-traffic consumer web or multi-tenant SaaS environments preferred

Responsibilities

Contribute to our core platform codebase by helping build and maintain shared services such as authentication and identity, API services, and deployment pipelines
Help research and design a future internal platform portal to catalogue our products and services, and centralize self-service workflows
Identify areas of developer toil and friction, and design self-service solutions to reduce repetitive tasks and frequent support requests
Manage CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation for containerized and serverless applications
Partner with Coforma's growth team to deliver innovative solutions and prototypes on our platform
Promote a Platform-as-a-Product mindset to accelerate the delivery of solutions for all Coforma departments
Serve as a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) and DevOps lead for the innovation department, supporting product and platform vision by helping shape an in-house SRE and DevOps practice
Implement and oversee an observability stack (Grafana, Datadog, OTEL, Sentry, Incident.io) to standardize the monitoring, alerting, incident response, and performance of our products and services
Collaborate across departments as a subject matter expert (SME) to promote SRE best practices and principles within other Engineering and Delivery teams
Define Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) to help drive engineering and product excellence, and work cross-functionally to help define customer Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
Lead and promote best practices of Incident Response and Management (IRM) using modern IRM tools
Mentor junior Platform, DevOps, and SREs
Help manage our Google Cloud Platform (GCP) environment with a focus on performance, resiliency, and security
Use and promote Infrastructure as Code (IaC) such as Terraform or Pulumi for consistent, secure deployments and change management
Assist developers across engineering teams in their use of cloud infrastructure
Contribute to the design of high-availability cloud architecture
Implement shift-left security to help developers ship secure code with minimal friction
Assist Platform leadership with compliance goals such as SOC 2, HIPAA, NIST 800-53, and other regulatory standards
Promote secure SDLC and DevSecOps tools and practices