Principal Platform Engineer

• Depth. 15+ years across the platform disciplines (platform engineering, cloud, DevOps, SRE, and software engineering), including deep hands-on experience building and operating services consumed by multiple teams or business units.
• Platform engineering. Hands-on experience building internal developer platforms and shared services used by many teams or business units (self-service, golden paths, API versioning and backward compatibility, adoption), with a platform-as-product mindset that treats engineers as customers and reduces their cognitive load.
• Cloud engineering. Strong, current, hands-on expertise on AWS (or Azure/GCP): containers and Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi, or similar), and practical command of networking, identity, security posture, and cost.
• DevOps. Deep hands-on CI/CD and GitOps experience, building and operating delivery pipelines and environment automation, and improving the developer experience of shipping change safely and fast.
• Site reliability engineering. Production-ownership experience: SLIs and SLOs, error budgets, observability, incident response, capacity planning, and toil reduction through automation.
• Software engineering. An excellent engineer with strong design sensibility (API contracts, clean abstractions, separation of concerns) who builds production services as durable products and stays hands-on in the code. Fluent in at least one modern backend language (Go, Python, TypeScript, or similar), with sound build-vs-buy judgment.
• Platform security. Hands-on cloud-native security expertise (IAM, OAuth/OIDC, secrets and workload identity, certificate lifecycle, policy-as-code, and secure software supply chain), with a track record of building secure-by-default platforms.
• Architecture and standards stewardship. A track record of shaping reference architectures, golden paths, and engineering standards that other teams adopt, turning them into executable guidance rather than documentation.
• AI-first delivery. Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development and agentic coding workflows (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or similar), able to define best practices and guardrails and to shape how these tools change delivery, code quality, and team structure.
• Influence and communication. Exceptional written and verbal communication, able to build trust across organizational boundaries, align engineers across operating companies, and mentor without relying on positional authority.

Originally posted on Himalayas