Principal Platform Engineer

The Role

This is a 0→1 build. You'll own the architecture, build and rollout of Neko's internal AI developer platform, shaping how our engineers design, ship and operate software through agentic, AI-assisted workflows. It's a hands-on technical leadership role. You'll be the person setting long-term direction for AI agents, tooling and the systems underneath them, while also doing the work.

What You'll Deliver

• In the first 6 months:
  • A clear architectural direction for the platform
  • Initial components shipped and adopted by early teams
  • Measurable improvements to developer speed, reliability and autonomy
  • Genuine organic adoption across engineering, driven by value not mandate
• By month 12:
  • A substantive shift toward agentic, engineer-led development workflows
  • Platform scaled beyond pilot groups to multiple teams
  • Clear ownership models for agents, tooling and supporting systems
  • Long-term architecture defined and moving toward maturity

Must-haves

• Proven experience building and shipping an internal developer platform, hands-on, not advisory
• A strong track record leading agentic or AI-assisted development work that engineers actually use day-to-day
• Real backend engineering depth with production systems, recent Java or C# strongly preferred
• Experience rolling out platform tooling to 20-30+ developers with meaningful adoption
• Expertise with workflow engines such as AWS Step Functions, Azure Durable Functions, Temporal, Conductor or Dagster
• The ability to drive change through influence and credibility, not positional authority
• 10-15+ years of engineering experience with substantial platform ownership

Nice to have

• Full-stack exposure, though backend depth is the priority
• Background in product-led SaaS or organisations with strong internal developer tooling culture