Principal Platform Engineer

About the role

The Principal Platform Engineer is a senior individual contributor and technical leader responsible for shaping, scaling, and governing ACI’s internal platforms as products, not projects. This role operates at the intersection of architecture, developer experience, cloud platforms, DevSecOps, and organizational enablement.

Key Responsibilities

• Serve as a technical authority for platform architecture across build-time and run-time domains (CI/CD, Kubernetes/OpenShift, cloud infrastructure, secrets, observability, and delivery tooling).
• Define and evolve reference architectures, platform standards, and design guardrails aligned with enterprise security, compliance, and FinOps expectations.
• Lead architectural design reviews and proactively guide teams away from bespoke or non-scalable solutions.
• Drive cloud-agnostic and hybrid designs, supporting customer-managed, SaaS, and on-prem deployments.
• Treat platform capabilities as products with roadmaps, clear ownership, success metrics, and adoption goals.
• Design and maintain golden paths for common developer workflows (build, test, deploy, operate).
• Partner with Product, Client Delivery, and Engineering teams to reduce cognitive load and delivery friction.
• Ensure platforms are self-service, automated, and documented, minimizing ticket-driven workflows.
• Lead adoption of everything-as-code practices (IaC, policy-as-code, pipelines, configuration).
• Influence CI/CD standards, testing frameworks, artifact management, and release automation.
• Drive consistency across GitHub, pipelines, branching, and SDLC tooling.
• Provide deep expertise in Kubernetes and OpenShift, including multi-arch, multi-cloud, and customer-managed environments.
• Guide platform support for AWS, Azure, GCP, and Red Hat OpenShift with a consistent operating model.
• Define Day-0, Day-1, and Day-2 operational tooling (installers, upgrades, health checks, DR, secrets rotation).
• Mentorship & inner-sourcing:
• Act as a mentor and technical coach for senior and staff-level engineers.
• Set expectations for high-quality design documentation, ADRs, and knowledge sharing.
• Promote and enable inner-sourcing, making it easy for product teams to contribute back to the platform.
• Be accountable for onboarding success of new engineers through guidance and technical stewardship.
• AI-Assisted Engineering & Innovation:
• Champion AI-assisted engineering practices embedded into everyday workflows (testing, reviews, documentation, insights).
• Help define guardrails for responsible AI usage within platform engineering.
• Explore and prototype AI-enabled platform capabilities that improve developer productivity and platform reliability.

Required Qualifications

• 12+ years of experience in software engineering, devops, cloud, or platform engineering roles.
• Deep hands-on expertise with:
• Kubernetes and/or OpenShift
• CI/CD systems and SDLC tooling
• Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, ARM, CloudFormation, etc.)
• Cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP)

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience operating platforms at enterprise scale with strong governance requirements.
• Background in customer-managed or regulated environments.
• Experience defining or operating an Internal Developer Platform (IDP).
• Familiarity with DevSecOps tooling, policy-as-code, and FinOps practices.
• Experience contributing to or leading inner-source initiatives.

What Success Looks Like

• Platform capabilities are adopted because they are the easiest and safest path, not because they are mandated.
• Product teams ship faster with fewer escalations and less manual intervention.
• Architecture decisions scale across teams and environments without constant rework.
• Engineers view the platform as a career accelerator, not a constraint.

Job ID (Requisition #19247)

ACI Worldwide is an AA/EEO employer in the United States, which includes providing equal opportunity for protected veterans and individuals with disabilities, and an EEO employer globally.