SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Salary: USD 250,000 - 295,000 / annual
Altana is seeking a Principal Platform Engineer to serve as the technical authority for the platform that powers the company's AI-driven product network. This is a senior individual contributor role reporting to the Senior Director of Platform Engineering, focused on steering architecture across organizational boundaries rather than managing a single team's backlog.
Altana operates a complex, broad infrastructure estate: multi-cloud deployments across AWS and Azure, a multi-tenant commercial platform, accredited environments including FedRAMP and IRAP, and dedicated sovereign deployments for national customers. The platform architecture directly determines how quickly product teams can ship, how fast new customers onboard, and infrastructure costs. You will set the technical direction for this estate and have significant white space to tackle the most consequential problems.
You will be a permanent member of the Platform Engineering leadership team and serve as the go-to technical authority when questions span multiple teams across the company.
Key Responsibilities:
- Drive technical decisions and systems architecture across multiple organizations, not just Platform Engineering; contribute to company-wide design through existing forums and propose new ones where needed.
- Own the platform reference architecture across AWS and Azure, spanning commercial, regulated, and sovereign environments; define the patterns that engineering teams build against.
- Translate company strategy into area-level technical strategy, keep it aligned with customer and product outcomes, and communicate options and tradeoffs to leadership.
- Lead architecture for cross-cutting platform concerns: ingress and API gateway, authentication and authorization, SSO and RBAC, service-to-service communication, and governing conventions.
- Design the provisioning path for new environments and tenants so that standing up a region, accredited environment, or customer tenant is repeatable with known shape and timeline.
- Set standards for infrastructure as code, GitOps, Kubernetes configuration, and release engineering across the estate; drive adoption through RFCs, design reviews, and reference implementations rather than mandate.
- Create and run forums that align senior engineers, including design review; establish rhythms that maintain a broad view of delivery and quality.
- Act as a cross-functional partner in planning, validating approaches, costing, and implementation options with product, implementation, and finance stakeholders.
- Write and prototype the hard parts yourself, including greenfield platform components and proofs of concept that de-risk directions before teams commit.
- Partner with Security and Compliance to ensure accreditation requirements are designed into the platform rather than handled per-environment.
- Grow engineers around you through mentorship, pairing, and review; raise the technical bar toward staff and principal level work.
- Interview and help hire, including at senior and leadership levels; represent Altana's technical work with customers, partners, and the wider industry.
Requirements:
- 10+ years building and operating cloud infrastructure and platforms, including time as the recognized technical authority for a platform other engineering teams depended on.
- Background in SRE or platform engineering with real ownership of systems that other engineers built on top of.
- Production experience building and operating environments in AWS and/or Azure at multi-account, multi-environment scale.
- Strong Infrastructure as Code skills with Terraform, OpenTofu, or similar tools.
- Deep Kubernetes experience, including cluster management, multi-cluster operations, and platform abstractions built on top of it.
- GitOps as your deployment model, with hands-on experience running ArgoCD, Flux, or equivalent in production.
- Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development and agentic coding tools, and a considered point of view on where they belong in engineering workflows and where they do not.
- Working understanding of how regulatory and accreditation constraints shape architecture, including environments where continuous delivery does not apply.
- Programming ability in Python, Go, or similar languages; you still write code and want to.
- Track record of architecture that actually got adopted across teams you did not own, earned through influence rather than authority.
- Long-term view; ability to tie technical decisions to cost, delivery, and product impact.
- Excellent written communication; design docs and RFCs are how this role scales.
- Self-directed with good judgment about which problems deserve your attention.
- BS or MS degree in Computer Science, or equivalent experience.
