Principal Software Engineer, Platform Engineering

About the role

Joining Moderna offers the unique opportunity to be part of a pioneering team that's revolutionizing medicine through mRNA technology, with a diverse pipeline of development programs across various diseases. This is a senior individual contributor role that combines deep technical execution with cross-functional technical leadership across developers ("Builders"), Cybersecurity, Architecture, AI platform teams, and broader teams to provide scalable, secure, and user-focused capabilities that make the right path the easiest path for Moderna’s engineering teams.

Responsibilities

• Design and build secure platform capabilities using Python/TypeScript, GitHub Actions, Pulumi, Docker, AWS, and relevant internal or vendor APIs.
• Lead the design and evolution of AI runtime safety and AI gateway patterns, including policy enforcement, access controls, telemetry, auditability and operational controls.
• Build and guide implementation of governed AI-assisted development workflows by packaging approved tools, creating reusable integration patterns, improving developer experience, and embedding security and compliance expectations into paved-road delivery workflows.
• Partner with Cybersecurity, Architecture, AI platform teams, and engineering leaders to align on platform standards, adoption strategy, risk posture, and implementation tradeoffs.
• Create and drive adoption of templates, reference implementations, documentation, examples, and paved-road patterns that help application teams adopt secure development and AI-assisted workflows.
• Improve developer experience by identifying systemic friction, reducing setup time, eliminating manual toil, standardizing common workflows, and making secure patterns easy to adopt.
• Establish and mature operational practices for owned capabilities, including monitoring, alerting, dashboards, runbooks, support models, service ownership, and lifecycle management.
• Identify recurring developer pain points and influence roadmap by proposing improvements to shared frameworks, templates, platform tooling, and paved paths.
• Lead integration of secure software delivery controls into development workflows, including CI/CD guardrails, policy checks, artifact controls, and developer remediation patterns.
• Contribute hands-on across Builder Tools & Platforms priorities as team needs evolve, including developer tooling, platform automation, secure delivery patterns, internal frameworks, and operational support.
• Mentor and coach engineers, raise engineering standards, review design and implementations, and help teams make durable technical decisions across platform and applications boundaries.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, platform engineering, DevOps, infrastructure automation, secure software delivery, or a related role.
• Deep software engineering experience designing, implementing, and operating developer platforms, internal tools, infrastructure automation, CI/CD systems, or secure software delivery platforms.
• Very strong programming skills in Python or TypeScript/JavaScript.
• Significant experience with GitHub, GitHub Actions, CI/CD workflows, and modern software delivery practices.
• Significant experience with AWS or another cloud provider for deploying and managing applications or platform services.
• Experience with Docker and containerized applications.
• Strong understanding of secure software development practices, software supply chain, dependency management, vulnerability scanning, artifact management, secrets handling, identity, authorization, and policy enforcement.
• Proven ability to set technical direction and design systems that balance security, standardization, usability, reliability, and developer productivity.
• Proven experience leading technical initiatives with cross-functional stakeholders.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers, raise technical standards, and guide teams through architecture, design, implementation, and operational tradeoffs.
• Expert troubleshooting skills across application code, build pipelines, cloud infrastructure, networking, identity, developer tooling, and third-party platforms.
• Demonstrated ability to adapt to changing team priorities, operate effectively in ambiguous problem spaces, and contribute across a range of platform engineering responsibilities, including areas outside immediate prior experience.

Qualifications

• Experience with AI-assisted development tooling, AI gateway patterns, model or API access controls, policy-as-code, telemetry, or runtime safety controls.
• Experience shaping platform strategy or technical roadmaps for capabilities adopted by multiple engineering teams.
• Experience partnering with security, architecture, platform, and application teams to drive adoption of shared capabilities and standards.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code tools such as Pulumi, CDK, Terraform, or similar.
• Experience with application security, cloud security, software supply chain controls, vulnerability management workflows, or secure CI/CD guardrails.
• Experience building internal developer platforms, paved-road workflows, reusable templates, CLIs, scaffolding systems, or shared engineering standards.
• Experience with Kubernetes, container security, base image lifecycle management, secrets management, network isolation, or secure runtime patterns.
• Experience creating documentation, reference architecture, onboarding materials, and developer enablement content for shared platform capabilities.

Pay & Benefits

The salary range for this role is $142,500.00 - $256,500.00. This is the lowest to highest salary we in good faith believe we would pay for this role at the time of this posting. An individual’s position within the salary range will be based on several factors including, but not limited to, specific competencies, relevant education, qualifications, certifications, experience, skills, performance, and business or organizational needs.

Pay & Benefits:

• Competitive healthcare, plus voluntary benefit programs to support your unique needs.
• A holistic approach to well-being, with access to fitness, mindfulness, and mental health support.
• Family planning benefits, including fertility, adoption, and surrogacy support.
• Generous paid time off, including vacation, volunteer days, sabbatical, global recharge days, and a discretionary year-end shutdown.
• Savings and investments to help you plan for the future.
• Location-specific perks and extras.

About Moderna:

Since our founding in 2010, we have aspired to build the leading mRNA technology platform, the infrastructure to reimagine how medicines are created and delivered, and a world-class team. We believe in giving our people a platform to change medicine and an opportunity to change the world. By living our mission, values, and mindsets every day, our people are the driving force behind our scientific progress and our culture. Together, we are creating a culture of belonging and building an organization that cares deeply for our patients, our employees, the environment, and our communities.

We are proud to have been recognized as a Science Magazine Top Biopharma Employer, a Fast Company Best Workplace for Innovators, and a Great Place to Work in the U.S. If you want to make a difference and join a team that is changing the future of medicine, we invite you to visit modernatx.com/careers to learn more about our current opportunities.

Our Working Model:

We believe an in-person culture is critical to our success. By cultivating a workplace that values diverse experiences, backgrounds, and ideas, we create an environment where every employee can contribute their best. Moderna is committed to offering reasonable accommodations to qualified job applicants with disabilities. Any applicant requiring an accommodation in connection with the hiring process and/or to perform the essential functions of the position for which the applicant has applied should contact the Accommodations team at leavesandaccommodations@modernatx.com.

Export Control Notice:

This position may involve access to technology or data that is subject to U.S. export control laws, including the Export Administration Regulations (EAR). As such, employment is contingent upon the applicant’s ability to access export-controlled information in accordance with U.S. law. Due to the nature of the work and regulatory requirements, only individuals who qualify as U.S. persons (citizens, permanent residents, asylees, or refugees) are eligible for this position. For this role Moderna is unable to sponsor non-U.S. persons to apply for an export control license.