Principal Platform Engineer

Role overview A principal-level platform engineer is needed to shape shared infrastructure, developer tooling, and backend services for a large-scale personalized retail engineering organization. This is a hands-on technical leadership role that combines architecture, implementation, and mentorship to reduce operational friction and accelerate product delivery. The position partners closely with engineering managers, architects, and program managers to embed AI-driven workflows into the developer experience.

Responsibilities - Drive end-to-end delivery of platform initiatives from discovery and design through rollout, observability, and operational readiness. - Design and build scalable APIs, gateways, and backend services that improve developer experience and system performance. - Prototype and productionize emerging technologies, including AI agents and automated workflows, as safe, reusable platform tools. - Lead technical design reviews and mentor engineers through code review, pairing, and constructive feedback. - Reduce manual toil by shipping self-service tooling, automation, and continuous improvement across production systems. - Evolve core platforms so AI agents and automated systems can safely discover capabilities, execute actions, monitor outputs, and recover from failures.

Requirements - Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent practical experience, plus 5+ years building complex production platform, infrastructure, backend, or developer tooling systems. - Deep experience with distributed architectures, microservices, APIs, and cloud infrastructure, with proficiency in Ruby/Rails, Python, or Rust. - Hands-on experience using and implementing modern AI-assisted engineering workflows such as AI agents, LLM integrations, or coding assistants. - Demonstrated ability to lead complex technical projects end-to-end, communicate tradeoffs clearly, and influence cross-functional teams without direct authority. - Ability to sit for extended periods, use a computer and office equipment, and communicate effectively in writing and verbally.

Nice to have - Experience with GraphQL, API gateways, and modern web frameworks like React and TypeScript. - Exposure to e-commerce, personalization, or large-scale retail engineering ecosystems. - Background building self-service platform tools that safely expose infrastructure to AI agents.

Benefits and work setup - Competitive salary, annual bonus eligibility, and restricted stock unit grants. - Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision benefits. - US-based salary range of $125,300-$209,000, with variation by location and experience.