Principal Platform Engineer

About the role

We are seeking a Principal Platform Engineer to drive engineering excellence across application engineering, data engineering, machine learning engineering, and platform infrastructure. This role requires a systems thinker who can shape the technical direction of the entire engineering organization.

Responsibilities

• Partner with engineering leadership to shape the long-term technical direction of the engineering organization.
• Provide technical leadership across application, data, and ML engineering and platform services.
• Evaluate decisions through the lens of scalability, maintainability, reliability, security, and operational simplicity.
• Identify cross-team opportunities to simplify systems and improve engineering effectiveness.
• Drive engineering excellence by raising the bar for software quality through code reviews, engineering standards, and technical mentorship.
• Standardize QA/QC practices and establish consistent engineering quality across teams.
• Drive adoption of AI-assisted software development and modern engineering practices.
• Improve engineering visibility through metrics, dashboards, and operational health indicators.
• Lead architecture and design reviews for major technical initiatives.
• Establish evaluation frameworks for agentic systems to measure reasoning latency, tool-use reliability, and hallucination rates.
• Build scalable platforms by designing systems capable of supporting future growth, identifying bottlenecks before they become production issues, improving observability, reliability, resiliency, and capacity planning, developing reference architectures and reusable platform patterns that accelerate engineering teams, and designing platforms capable of orchestrating complex agentic workflows and managing non-deterministic reasoning loops.
• Support platform operations by providing technical guidance on cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, and platform automation, assisting with operational issues when needed, automating repetitive work, evolving internal platform capabilities that help engineering teams move faster, developing secure tool-use infrastructure and governance frameworks for agentic systems.

Requirements

Qualifications include 8+ years of software engineering experience building production systems, expert-level Python, a strong software engineering foundation, experience building and operating large-scale, data-intensive applications, strong understanding of distributed systems, APIs, cloud-native architecture, and modern software design, experience with relational, document, and graph databases, experience designing modern data platforms, experience with software quality, testing strategies, CI/CD, and engineering best practices, a systems-thinking mindset and the ability to understand complex systems quickly and find scalable, pragmatic solutions, excellent communication skills and the ability to influence technical direction without direct authority.

Skills

• Kubernetes and container orchestration.
• Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or similar).
• Spark, Airflow, dbt, or other modern data engineering ecosystems.
• AI-assisted software development tools.
• Mentoring senior engineers and leading architecture across multiple teams.
• Agentic frameworks (e.g., LangChain, CrewAI) and building evaluation harnesses for LLM/agentic applications.

Benefits

Competitive salary, equity options, health benefits, flexible PTO, and professional development support. Hybrid role based in Cambridge, MA; occasional travel may be required.