Principal Platform Engineer job description

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

RESPONSIBILITIES
- Set the landing zone strategy for the organization, including how new business units or acquisitions are onboarded, and defend the design to a security or compliance review.
- Set the infrastructure-as-code strategy for the organization, including module ownership and how breaking changes are rolled out, and arbitrate between conflicting team standards.
- Set the network and access architecture standards for the organization, and decide when a legacy exception is worth the risk it carries.
- Set the disaster recovery standard for the organization, including which services must fail over automatically, and decide when a plan is good enough to stop drilling.
- Set the release strategy the organization deploys by and decide what evidence a rollout must produce before it proceeds.
- Set the container platform strategy for the organization, including what runs on it and what does not, and justify that boundary to sceptical teams.

REQUIREMENTS
- Experience at the Staff Platform Engineer level (level 4 of 5) or equivalent
- Holds Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate and AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional

REQUIRED SKILLS
Cloud Infrastructure
- Cloud Landing Zone Design — You can set the landing zone strategy for the organization, 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 organization, 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 organization, 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 organization, 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 with slow, flaky or tangled builds, and set the pipeline conventions your team works to.
- Release Automation and Deployment Strategy — You can set the release strategy the organization 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.
- Environment and Configuration Management — You can bring environments that have drifted apart back under source control without downtime, and set the approval path your team's changes follow for each risk class.

Container Platform
- Container Orchestration — You can set the container platform strategy for the organization, 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.
- Service Mesh Operations — You can plan a mesh rollout or upgrade across many services without dropping traffic, settle what the mesh owns versus the application, and trace sidecar latency and failures.

SRE and Reliability
- On-Call Incident Command — You can set the incident command process for the organization, 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 organization, 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 organization 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 program across several services, and get sceptical teams to opt in.
- Systems Troubleshooting — You can set the diagnostic data every service must expose and the evidence a diagnosis needs before a fix ships.

Cost and DevEx
- Cloud Cost Management — You can set how the organization attributes, budgets and reviews cloud spend, and decide which purchase commitments it makes. You change spending behavior in teams you do not manage by giving them visibility rather than a cap.
- Platform Self-Service Tooling — You can decide which paths the organization 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.

Delivery
- Project Management — You can set the everyday habits for how work is organized and followed up across the organization, and teams you do not lead adopt the routines you introduce.
- Planning & Estimation — You can forecast work and staffing quarters ahead, and set the estimating method other teams use.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can report the organization's most exposed outcomes to its leaders as they stand, including bad news, and answer for them.
- Quality Focus — You can raise the quality bar across the organization by building the tools and habits that make the careful way the easy way.

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

Communication
- Communication — You can set how the organization communicates by creating the forums and norms that teams use to share information.
- Collaboration — You can remove the barriers that stop teams working together by putting in place routines and forums they use across the organization.
- Writing & Documentation — You can set the writing standard the organization works to, and documents you wrote are still in use long after you have moved on.
- Stakeholder Management — You can represent the organization in its most important relationships and set how it engages with everyone who depends on it.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can set direction for the whole organization, make hard calls under real uncertainty, and carry the decisions nobody else wants to own.
- Mentoring — You can shape how the organization grows its people, and those you developed are themselves named by others as strong in their field.
- Strategic Thinking — You can shape the organization'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)
- AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional (required from Staff Platform Engineer)