Principal Platform Engineer job description

Platform and DevOps — Principal Platform Engineer
Shapes infrastructure strategy and the hardest calls org-wide.

REQUIRED SKILLS
Cloud Infrastructure
- Cloud Landing Zone Design — You can set the landing zone strategy for the organisation, including how new business units or acquisitions are onboarded, and defend the design to a security or compliance review.
- Infrastructure Provisioning Automation — You can set the infrastructure-as-code strategy for the organisation, including module ownership and how breaking changes are rolled out, and arbitrate between conflicting team standards.
- Network and Cloud Security Configuration — You can set the network and access architecture standards for the organisation, and decide when a legacy exception is worth the risk it carries.
- Secrets and Credential Rotation — You can eliminate a category of long-lived secrets by moving it to short-lived or dynamically issued credentials, and get other teams to adopt the pattern.
- Disaster Recovery and Backup Planning — You can set the disaster recovery standard for the organisation, including which services must fail over automatically, and decide when a plan is good enough to stop drilling.
- Infrastructure Vulnerability and Patch Management — You can drive remediation of a vulnerability that spans many teams' systems, and change the pipeline so the same class of gap does not recur.

CI/CD and Delivery
- CI Pipeline Engineering — You can rebuild delivery for a repository where builds are slow, flaky or tangled across many services, and you set the pipeline conventions your team works to. You are who people ask when a green build ships a broken artifact.
- Release Automation and Deployment Strategy — You can set the release strategy the organisation deploys by and decide what evidence a rollout must produce before it proceeds. You raise deployment safety in teams you do not manage without mandating one tool.
- Artifact and Package Registry Management — You can design artifact management across many teams, including signing and provenance, so any deployed build traces back to the commit it came from. You are who people ask when an image cannot be matched to any source.
- Environment and Configuration Management — You can untangle environments that have drifted apart over years and bring them back under source control without downtime. You are who people ask when a change works everywhere except production.

Container Platform
- Container Orchestration — You can set the container platform strategy for the organisation, including what runs on it and what does not, and justify that boundary to sceptical teams.
- Container Image Build and Hardening — You can harden images for services with awkward runtime needs and shrink the attack surface across a whole fleet without breaking builds. You are who people ask when an image passes the scanner but still fails a security review.
- Service Mesh Operations — You can plan a mesh rollout or upgrade across many services without dropping traffic, and settle what the mesh should own versus the application. You are called in when latency or a failure sits in the sidecar rather than the code.

SRE and Reliability
- On-Call Incident Command — You can set the incident command process for the organisation, train the people who run it, and decide when the process itself needs to change after a bad incident.
- Service Level Objective Management — You can set the SLO methodology for the organisation, including how error budgets gate releases, and defend it when a launch is blocked by one.
- Alert Design and Noise Reduction — You can audit an alerting setup across several services, cut its noise significantly, and get the team to trust paging again.
- Postmortem and Incident Learning — You can set how the organisation runs and learns from postmortems, and decide when a pattern of incidents means a system should be redesigned rather than patched again.
- Chaos Engineering and Failure Testing — You can build the case for a failure-testing programme across several services, and get sceptical teams to opt in.

Cost and DevEx
- Cloud Cost Management — You can set how the organisation attributes, budgets and reviews cloud spend, and decide which purchase commitments it makes. You change spending behaviour in teams you do not manage by giving them visibility rather than a cap.
- Capacity Forecasting and Right-Sizing — You can plan capacity across a fleet whose workloads compete for one pool, and size for events such as a launch or a migration with no usable history. You are who people ask when a service falls over at a load the forecast said it would survive.
- Platform Self-Service Tooling — You can decide which paths the organisation paves, which it deliberately leaves open, and when a platform tool is retired. You win adoption from teams you do not manage by making the paved road faster than the alternative.
- Developer Platform Documentation and Enablement — You can plan enablement for a large platform change so teams migrate without queueing at your desk, and restructure documentation that has grown into a maze. You are who people ask when a rollout stalls because nobody understands the new path.

Delivery
- Project Management — You can run the organisation's largest and most contested programmes, and the planning practices you introduce get adopted by teams you do not lead.
- Planning & Estimation — You can forecast at the scale of quarters and headcount, and the estimation practice you set is what the wider organisation plans against.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can take on the outcomes the organisation is most exposed on, and other leaders route ownerless problems to you by default.
- Quality Focus — You can raise the quality bar across the organisation by building the tooling and habits that make the careful path the easy one.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can crack problems the organisation has repeatedly failed to solve, and your approach becomes how others tackle that whole class of problem.
- Domain Expertise — You can influence how the field is practised beyond this organisation, and your expertise settles questions that have stood open for years.
- Continuous Learning — You can set what the organisation invests its learning time in, and the material and practice you create outlive your involvement.

Communication
- Communication — You can set how the organisation communicates, and the forums and norms you create measurably improve how information travels through it.
- Collaboration — You can dismantle the barriers that stop teams working together, and how the organisation collaborates changes because of what you built.
- Technical Writing — You can set the writing standard the organisation works to, and documents you authored are still in use long after you moved on.
- Stakeholder Management — You can represent the organisation in its most consequential relationships and set how it engages with everyone who depends on it.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can set direction for the whole organisation, make hard calls under real uncertainty, and carry the decisions nobody else wants to own.
- Mentoring — You can shape how the organisation grows its people, and those you developed are themselves named by others as strong practitioners.
- Strategic Thinking — You can shape the organisation's strategy, and the bets you argued for are visible in where it ended up.

REQUIRED CERTIFICATIONS
- HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate (required from Platform Engineer)
- Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) (required from Senior Platform Engineer)
- Google Professional Cloud Architect (required from Senior Platform Engineer)
- AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional (required from Staff Platform Engineer)