Principal Platform Engineer
Role details
Job location
Tech stack
Job description
- Define the platform vision and deliver incrementally: Shape and execute platform initiatives across hybrid cloud and bare-metal environments in small, value-driven steps that improve usability and adoption. Establish pragmatic standards for infrastructure, security, and operations, balancing consistency with flexibility.
- Lead critical platform initiatives: Take ownership of high-impact platform projects, driving them end-to-end from design through implementation.
- Level up platform engineering : Mentor and elevate platform engineers to grow their skills, raise the technical bar, and foster a culture of excellence in the team.
- Drive technical decisions and standards: Influence design decisions and promote engineering best practices to build robust, scalable, and maintainable systems.
- Enable self-service platform capabilities: Build and enhance self-service platform features and workflows to improve developer experience and standardized workflows across traditional, AI, and agentic use cases.
- Accelerate Continuous Delivery: Streamline CI/CD to enable fast, reliable, and low-friction software delivery, minimizing manual toil and boosting developer velocity.
- Lead Reliability and Observability Initiatives: Drive reliability and observability initiatives, leading postmortems and implementing SLOs, monitoring, and resilience patterns to strengthen platform stability.
Requirements
Conductor is seeking a Principal Platform Engineer to be a builder, systems thinker and a technical leader. You will evolve our hybrid cloud and bare-metal platform, enabling product and engineering to deliver software faster and more reliably. We run terabyte-scale Elasticsearch clusters, a high-volume CI/CD pipeline ecosystem, and production workloads across thousands of containers, with a strong focus on automation, observability, and resilience. You are an excellent communicator and collaborator, able to align multiple teams and influence technical direction. This is a hands-on, high-impact role where you will shape platform roadmap and best practices across teams, influencing how engineers design, deploy, and operate critical services that power multiple products and business domains., * 16-20+ years of overall experience in platform, cloud, or infrastructure engineering, including hybrid cloud and bare-metal environments.
- Hands-on experience in platform engineering environments, applying first-principles thinking, elevating team output and driving value.
- Proven experience in both small startups and large, fast-moving enterprises, adapting quickly to diverse organizational dynamics.
- Track record of applying a product mindset to platform engineering, understanding internal users, and solving systemic issues to enhance productivity and adoption.
- Strong background in CI/CD, automation, container orchestration, and infrastructure tooling (Kubernetes, Docker, ArgoCD, Terraform).
- Demonstrated ability to manage production systems end-to-end, combining operational ownership with technical guidance.
- Applies enterprise-grade security and compliance practices while enabling innovation, ensuring the platform remains secure
- Experience in operating high-scale distributed applications, with expertise in database technologies (SQL, NoSQL), Elasticsearch, caching layers, and large-scale data pipelines.