Principal Software Engineer, Platform Engineering

ModernaTX • Cambridge, MA

15h • Onsite

About The Position

Joining Moderna offers the unique opportunity to be part of a pioneering team that's revolutionizing medicine through mRNA technology, with a diverse pipeline of development programs across various diseases. Moderna is looking for a hands-on, impact-driven Principal Software Engineer, Platform Engineering to help define, build and evolve reusable platform capabilities that enable application teams to develop, deploy, and operate software safely and effectively. This is a senior individual contributor role that combines deep technical execution with cross-functional technical leadership across developers ("Builders"), Cybersecurity, Architecture, AI platform teams, and broader teams to provide scalable, secure, and user-focused capabilities that make the right path the easiest path for Moderna’s engineering teams. The initial focus for this role will be advancing AI runtime safety and AI gateway capabilities, including reusable integration patterns, policy enforcement, telemetry, secure development workflows, and operational tooling, and paved-road controls for governed AI assisted development. Over time, this role will influence and contribute across the broader Builder Tools & Platforms portfolio, including developer tooling, secure software delivery, internal frameworks, platform automation, and paved-road engineering standards. This role is well suited for a principal engineer who thrives in ambiguous, high-impact problem spaces and can move fluidly from strategy and architecture to hands-on implementation, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, production operations, developer enablement, and secure software delivery. You will help translate emerging enterprise needs into reliable, reusable, and well-governed platform capabilities for Moderna’s engineering teams.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, platform engineering, DevOps, infrastructure automation, secure software delivery, or a related role.
• Deep software engineering experience designing, implementing, and operating developer platforms, internal tools, infrastructure automation, CI/CD systems, or secure software delivery platforms.
• Very strong programming skills in Python or TypeScript/JavaScript.
• Significant experience with GitHub, GitHub Actions, CI/CD workflows, and modern software delivery practices.
• Significant experience with AWS or another cloud provider for deploying and managing applications or platform services.
• Experience with Docker and containerized applications.
• Strong understanding of secure software development practices, software supply chain, dependency management, vulnerability scanning, artifact management, secrets handling, identity, authorization, and policy enforcement.
• Proven ability to set technical direction and design systems that balance security, standardization, usability, reliability, and developer productivity.
• Proven experience leading technical initiatives with cross-functional stakeholders.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers, raise technical standards, and guide teams through architecture, design, implementation, and operational tradeoffs.
• Expert troubleshooting skills across application code, build pipelines, cloud infrastructure, networking, identity, developer tooling, and third-party platforms.
• Demonstrated ability to adapt to changing team priorities, operate effectively in ambiguous problem spaces, and contribute across a range of platform engineering responsibilities, including areas outside immediate prior experience.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with AI-assisted development tooling, AI gateway patterns, model or API access controls, policy-as-code, telemetry, or runtime safety controls.
• Experience shaping platform strategy or technical roadmaps for capabilities adopted by multiple engineering teams.
• Experience partnering with security, architecture, platform, and application teams to drive adoption of shared capabilities and standards.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code tools such as Pulumi, CDK, Terraform, or similar.
• Experience with application security, cloud security, software supply chain controls, vulnerability management workflows, or secure CI/CD guardrails.
• Experience building internal developer platforms, paved-road workflows, reusable templates, CLIs, scaffolding systems, or shared engineering standards.
• Experience with Kubernetes, container security, base image lifecycle management, secrets management, network isolation, or secure runtime patterns.
• Experience creating documentation, reference architecture, onboarding materials, and developer enablement content for shared platform capabilities.

Responsibilities

• Design and build secure platform capabilities using Python/TypeScript, GitHub Actions, Pulumi, Docker, AWS, and relevant internal or vendor APIs.
• Lead the design and evolution of AI runtime safety and AI gateway patterns, including policy enforcement, access controls, telemetry, auditability and operational controls.
• Build and guide implementation of governed AI-assisted development workflows by packaging approved tools, creating reusable integration patterns, improving developer experience, and embedding security and compliance expectations into paved-road delivery workflows.
• Partner with Cybersecurity, Architecture, AI platform teams, and engineering leaders to align on platform standards, adoption strategy, risk posture, and implementation tradeoffs.
• Create and drive adoption of templates, reference implementations, documentation, examples, and paved-road patterns that help application teams adopt secure development and AI-assisted workflows.
• Improve developer experience by identifying systemic friction, reducing setup time, eliminating manual toil, standardizing common workflows, and making secure patterns easy to adopt.
• Establish and mature operational practices for owned capabilities, including monitoring, alerting, dashboards, runbooks, support models, service ownership, and lifecycle management.
• Identify recurring developer pain points and influence roadmap by proposing improvements to shared frameworks, templates, platform tooling, and paved paths.
• Lead integration of secure software delivery controls into development workflows, including CI/CD guardrails, policy checks, artifact controls, and developer remediation patterns.
• Contribute hands-on across Builder Tools & Platforms priorities as team needs evolve, including developer tooling, platform automation, secure delivery patterns, internal frameworks, and operational support.
• Mentor and coach engineers, raise engineering standards, review design and implementations, and help teams make durable technical decisions across platform and applications boundaries

Benefits

• Competitive healthcare, plus voluntary benefit programs to support your unique needs
• A holistic approach to well-being, with access to fitness, mindfulness, and mental health support
• Family planning benefits, including fertility, adoption, and surrogacy support
• Generous paid time off, including vacation, volunteer days, sabbatical, global recharge days, and a discretionary year-end shutdown
• Savings and investments to help you plan for the future
• Location-specific perks and extras

What This Job Offers

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