Principal Product Platform Engineer - Smartly

Datacom

6d•Remote

About The Position

The Smartly Platforms and Architecture Team is seeking a Principal Product Platform Engineer to own end-to-end technology outcomes and architecture. This role focuses on creating structural leverage across the business through technology and automation, improving cost-to-serve, and fostering engineer development through training, mentoring, and sponsorship. The company is profitable with a significant user base and is embarking on a modernization of its technical infrastructure. This Principal role is crucial for architectural leverage, requiring a technically deep individual contributor who can elevate the business. The role involves being the senior technical authority in a major platform domain, co-authoring platform strategy, making architectural decisions for other teams, and designing/operating shared services, identity foundations, developer tooling, and reliability standards. The goal is to drive simplification, making the platform smaller, clearer, and more automated over time.

Requirements

Experience as a Principal Engineer, or senior-most engineer on a team, or a solution architect with recent coding experience.
Experience making architectural calls at scale and understanding the long-term consequences.
Deep comfort in a demanding application engineering space.
Ability to help move towards domain-driven design.
Familiarity with C# and .NET.
Sufficient knowledge of Python and TypeScript.
Ability to quickly become a company expert in a new language or framework as needed.
Comfort with taking existing decisions in a monolith, applying taste and judgment, and engineering modern solutions.
Experience with moving towards a modular monolith with a well-formed internal structure.
Experience pulling business logic out of stored procedures and into code.
Experience making choices around database and cloud technology.
Ability to help others feel at home in a complex technical environment.
Possession of judgment, taste, vision, and context.
Ability to differentiate between excellent AI-generated output and work that merely appears excellent.
Ability to recognize what good looks like on sight.
Ability to see how pieces fit together.
Knowledge of which best practices are applicable to the specific context.
Belief in writing as a core part of the work, not an afterthought.
Belief in respecting focus time and acting with remote-first intentionality.
Belief in strategic laziness (automating manual tasks).
Pragmatism in making choices that balance technical purity with business needs and colleague impact.
Commitment to making personal standards become team standards.
Willingness to have judgment, vision, taste, agency, and ownership that makes those around you faster.

Nice To Haves

Experience with domain-driven design.
Experience with Python and TypeScript (enough to be dangerous).
Experience moving to a modular monolith.
Experience pulling business logic out of stored procedures.
Experience making database and cloud technology choices.

Responsibilities

Own end-to-end technology outcomes and architecture.
Create structural leverage across the business through technology and automation.
Improve cost-to-serve through technology and automation.
Foster engineer development through training, mentoring, and sponsorship.
Act as the senior technical authority in a major platform domain (likely core platform design + shared frameworks).
Co-author the platform strategy.
Make architectural decisions that other teams depend on.
Design and operate shared services, identity foundations, developer tooling, and reliability standards.
Drive simplification of the platform.
Run design reviews and provide a second pair of eyes in reviews across the organization.
Conduct 1:1s with engineers being mentored and with the manager.
Pair with engineers in product squads on complex technical problems.
Build and automate processes, such as release processes and developer machine setup.
Perform clean architecture upgrades on the existing monolith.
Ensure agents and harnesses deeply understand the codebase and data model.
Write architecture decisions, design docs, and agentic prompts for the team.
Work on shared AI tooling to improve the speed of the engineering organization.
Document decisions, designs, tradeoffs, and post-incident learnings.
Contribute to a culture that values writing as a forcing function for thinking and clarity.
Protect calendar time for deep work and ensure meetings have a clear purpose.
Focus work in the mornings and hold meetings in the afternoons.
Participate in async standups and twice-weekly 'Smoko' sessions where work talk is banned.