Principal Platform Engineer

Altana•New York, NY

3h•$250,000 - $295,000•Remote

About The Position

Altana is looking for a Principal Platform Engineer to be the technical authority for the platform our products run on. This is a senior individual contributor role, reporting to the Senior Director of Platform Engineering, for someone who steers architecture across organizational boundaries rather than inside one team's backlog. Altana operates a broad estate, including multi-cloud infrastructure across AWS and Azure, a multi-tenant commercial platform, accredited environments like FedRAMP and IRAP, and dedicated sovereign deployments for national customers. The architecture that holds those together determines how fast every product team can ship, how quickly a new customer comes online, and what our infrastructure costs. You will set the direction for it, and you will have real white space to go after the problems you judge to be the most consequential. You will be a permanent member of the Platform Engineering leadership team alongside our engineering managers, and you will be the person other engineers across the company come to when a technical question spans more teams than any one of them owns.

Requirements

10+ years building and operating cloud infrastructure and platforms, including time as the recognized technical authority for a platform other engineering teams depended on
A background in SRE or platform engineering, with real ownership of systems that other engineers built on top of
Production experience building and operating environments in AWS and/or Azure at multi-account, multi-environment scale
Strong Infrastructure as Code skills with Terraform, OpenTofu, or similar tools
Deep Kubernetes experience, including cluster management, multi-cluster operations, and the platform abstractions built on top of it
GitOps as your deployment model, with hands-on experience running ArgoCD, Flux, or equivalent in production
Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development and agentic coding tools, and a considered point of view on where they belong in an engineering workflow and where they do not
A working understanding of how regulatory and accreditation constraints shape architecture, including environments where continuous delivery does not apply
Programming ability in Python, Go, or similar languages. You still write code, and you want to
A track record of architecture that actually got adopted across teams you did not own, earned through influence rather than authority
You hold a long-term view, and you can tie a technical decision to what it does to cost, delivery, and the product
Excellent written communication. Design docs and RFCs are how this role scales
Self-directed, with good judgment about which problems deserve your attention and which do not
BS or MS degree in Computer Science, or equivalent experience

Responsibilities

Drive technical decisions and systems architecture across multiple organizations, not only within Platform Engineering, and contribute to company-wide design through existing forums while proposing new ones where they are missing
Own the platform reference architecture across AWS and Azure and across our commercial, regulated, and sovereign environments, and define the patterns that engineering teams build against
Translate company strategy into area-level technical strategy, keep it aligned with customer and product outcomes, and communicate the options and tradeoffs upward so leadership can choose with a clear view of the consequences
Lead the architecture for cross-cutting platform concerns, including ingress and API gateway, authentication and authorization, SSO and RBAC, service-to-service communication, and the conventions that govern them
Design the provisioning path for new environments and tenants, so that standing up a region, an accredited environment, or a customer tenant is a repeatable process with a known shape and a known timeline
Set the standard for infrastructure as code, GitOps, Kubernetes configuration, and release engineering across the estate, including where AI-assisted development tooling belongs in platform work, and drive adoption through RFCs, design reviews, and reference implementations rather than mandate
Create and run the forums that get senior engineers aligned, including design review, and establish the rhythms that keep a broad view of delivery and quality across the area
Act as a cross-functional partner in planning, validating approaches, costing, and implementation options with product, implementation, and finance stakeholders before commitments are made
Write and prototype the hard parts yourself, including greenfield platform components and proofs of concept that de-risk a direction before a team commits to it
Partner with Security and Compliance so that accreditation requirements are a designed-in property of the platform instead of a per-environment effort
Grow the engineers around you through mentorship, pairing, and review, and raise the technical bar toward staff and principal level work
Interview and help us hire, including at senior and leadership levels, and represent Altana's technical work with customers, partners, and the wider industry