Principal Platform Engineer

Ralliant•,

9d•$148,900 - $276,500

About The Position

The Principal Platform Engineer is a senior individual contributor who builds and operates the platform’s core services while helping steward its 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 operating companies adopt, and set the technical bar through engineering, code review, and mentorship. The role reports to the Chief Software Platform Officer and partners closely with the Director of Technical Product Management and engineering teams across the operating companies. Ralliant is building a shared, AI-first platform to improve developer productivity and help its operating companies create, ship, and commercialize software more quickly. Operating companies retain ownership of their products, customers, and roadmaps, while the platform provides a common foundation and shared services. The position is hands-on, spanning platform architecture and service delivery. It includes building self-service capabilities, establishing platform standards and golden paths, advancing AI-assisted software delivery, and owning the reliability, security, and cost of platform services. The engineer also mentors engineers and supports a connected engineering community across the portfolio.

Requirements

15+ years of experience across platform engineering, cloud, DevOps, site reliability engineering, 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 focused on engineers as customers and reducing cognitive load.
Strong, current, hands-on cloud expertise on 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 building and operating delivery pipelines and environment automation, and improving the developer experience of shipping changes safely and quickly.
Production-ownership experience including SLIs and SLOs, error budgets, observability, incident response, capacity planning, and toil reduction through automation.
Strong software engineering and design sensibility, including API contracts, clean abstractions, and separation of concerns; ability to build durable production services and remain hands-on in code.
Fluency in at least one modern backend language such as Go, Python, TypeScript, or similar, 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; track record of building secure-by-default platforms.
Track record of shaping reference architectures, golden paths, and engineering standards adopted by other teams, and turning standards into executable guidance rather than documentation.
Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development and agentic coding workflows such as Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or similar; ability to define best practices and guardrails and shape how these tools affect 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 and ship core platform services end to end, from architecture through production and ongoing operation, as self-service capabilities that operating-company engineers can adopt with minimal friction.
Steward platform architecture and standards by shaping reference architecture, golden paths, and paved roads, and turning engineering standards into executable guidance through the Architecture Council.
Build and evolve templates, pipelines, and golden paths to advance AI-first software delivery and improve developer throughput.
Help extend the platform into shared services that support new software offerings.
Own the reliability, security, and cost of services built, including defining SLIs and SLOs, instrumenting observability, responding to incidents, and reducing toil through automation.
Set the technical bar through hands-on engineering, code review, and mentorship for platform and operating-company engineers.
Help build a connected engineering community across the portfolio.