Principal Platform Engineer

Position Summary

The Principal Platform Engineer is the organization's most senior individual contributor and technical authority for platform engineering. Working closely with executive technology leadership, architects, data scientists, and engineering teams, you will lead the design and delivery of the company's most critical systems. You will own the engineering pipeline from source code through production deployment, including CI/CD, infrastructure automation, cloud operations, and MLOps capabilities supporting machine learning model training and inference. This is a deeply hands-on technical role for an engineer who enjoys solving difficult engineering challenges. Rather than managing people directly, you will lead through technical excellence, architecture, mentorship, and engineering best practices. You will play a key role in transforming innovative ideas into production-grade software capable of supporting enterprise-scale environments while elevating engineering standards across the organization.

Key Qualifications

• Technical Leadership
• Act as the technical lead on the organization's most complex and high-impact engineering initiatives.
• Drive platform engineering standards, patterns, and best practices.
• Partner with architecture and engineering leadership to translate technical vision into production-ready solutions.
• Identify technical risks, trade-offs, and opportunities while guiding pragmatic engineering decisions.
• Platform Engineering Design, build, and operate highly scalable cloud-native services.
• Build resilient, secure, high-performance distributed systems.
• Resolve complex scalability, reliability, and production challenges.
• Champion automation, observability, and operational excellence throughout the software development lifecycle.
• AI Platform & Infrastructure
• Build infrastructure supporting AI and machine learning workloads.
• Develop frameworks for model deployment, orchestration, experimentation, and inference.
• Integrate AI services with enterprise applications and data platforms.
• Support scalable MLOps practices across development and production environments.
• Engineering Excellence
• Establish high standards for architecture, code quality, testing, documentation, and security.
• Lead architecture reviews and code reviews.
• Improve engineering tooling and developer productivity.
• Balance innovation with long-term scalability and maintainability.
• Technical Mentorship
• Mentor and coach engineers across the organization.
• Influence technical direction without direct people management.
• Aid with hiring and evaluating engineering talent.
• Serve as a trusted advisor to technical leadership.

Qualifications

• Required Experience:
• 10+ years of hands-on platform and software engineering experience.
• Deep expertise designing and operating distributed systems and cloud-native platforms.
• Proven experience delivering enterprise-scale software solutions.
• Strong proficiency in Python and modern software engineering practices.
• Demonstrated success leading complex technical initiatives as an individual contributor.
• PREFERRED EXPERIENCE:
• AI, machine learning, agentic AI, or large-scale data platform experience.
• Experience in cybersecurity, observability, cloud infrastructure, or platform engineering.
• Experience with LLM integrations, model inference, orchestration frameworks, and data pipelines.
• MLOps experience.
• Previous experience as a Principal Engineer, Staff Engineer, Distinguished Engineer, or similar senior technical leadership role.
• Startup or high-growth technology company experience.

Core Competencies

• Technical Leadership
• Distributed Systems Architecture
• Engineering Excellence
• Systems Thinking
• Cloud Platform Engineering
• Pragmatic Problem Solving
• Ownership & Accountability
• Mentorship
• Decision Making in Ambiguous Environments
• Technical Communication

Success Measures

• During your first year, you will deliver foundational components of the company's core platform.
• You will establish engineering standards adopted across the organization.
• You will improve platform scalability, reliability, and security.
• You will implement robust CI/CD and infrastructure automation practices.
• You will successfully operationalize AI and machine learning capabilities in production.
• You will mentor engineers and help raise the overall technical capability of the team.

About Affinity

Affinity Group is a technology and business consulting and services company. We believe in creating long term relationships between clients and consultants that foster a mutually beneficial partnership. Affinity is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. All employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, merit and business need. For more information on Affinity, please visit www.affinity-group.ca.