Principal Platform Engineer

Ralliant • Raleigh, NC

6d

About The Position

Ralliant is building a shared, AI-first platform to help its operating companies create and ship software more effectively. The platform will provide a common foundation, including developer productivity capabilities and shared services, while operating companies retain ownership of their products, customers, and roadmaps.

The Principal Platform Engineer is a senior individual contributor who builds and operates core platform services and helps steward the platform’s architecture and standards. The role spans cloud engineering, DevOps, site reliability engineering, and software engineering. Principals take major capabilities from design through production and ongoing operation, shape the golden paths adopted by operating companies, and set the technical bar through hands-on engineering, code review, and mentorship. The position reports to the Chief Software Platform Officer and partners closely with the Director of Technical Product Management and engineering teams across operating companies.

Requirements

• 15+ years of experience across platform engineering, cloud, DevOps, SRE, and software engineering, including deep hands-on experience building and operating services used by multiple teams or business units.
• Hands-on experience building internal developer platforms and shared services for many teams or business units, including self-service, golden paths, API versioning and backward compatibility, and adoption; a platform-as-product mindset that treats engineers as customers and reduces cognitive load.
• Strong, current, hands-on expertise with AWS or Azure/GCP, including containers and Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code such as Terraform or Pulumi, networking, identity, security posture, and cost.
• Deep hands-on CI/CD and GitOps experience, including building and operating delivery pipelines and environment automation and improving the developer experience of shipping changes safely and quickly.
• Production ownership experience involving SLIs and SLOs, error budgets, observability, incident response, capacity planning, and toil reduction through automation.
• Strong software design skills, including API contracts, clean abstractions, and separation of concerns; experience building durable production services and remaining hands-on in code.
• Fluency in at least one modern backend language, such as Go, Python, or TypeScript, and sound build-versus-buy judgment.
• Hands-on cloud-native security expertise, including IAM, OAuth/OIDC, secrets and workload identity, certificate lifecycle, policy-as-code, and secure software supply chain; experience building secure-by-default platforms.
• A track record of shaping reference architectures, golden paths, and engineering standards that other teams adopt, and turning them into executable guidance rather than documentation.
• Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development and agentic coding workflows such as Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor, including defining best practices and guardrails and shaping effects on delivery, code quality, and team structure.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication, ability to build trust across organizational boundaries and align engineers across operating companies, and ability to mentor without relying on positional authority.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate core platform services end to end as self-service capabilities that operating-company engineers can adopt with minimal friction.
• Steward the platform architecture and standards, shaping reference architecture, golden paths, and paved roads, and translate engineering standards into executable guidance through the Architecture Council.
• Advance AI-first software delivery by building and evolving templates, pipelines, and golden paths that improve developer throughput.
• Help extend the platform into shared services that support new software offerings.
• Own reliability, security, and cost for services built, including defining SLIs and SLOs, instrumenting observability, responding to incidents, and reducing toil through automation.
• Raise the technical 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.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed