Principal Engineer - Platform
First seen by Alion on Sep 10, 2026.
The Stack You Will Work On:
- A Java/Spring Boot microservices platform (GreyMatter) running on GKE, backed by Kafka, PostgreSQL, Redis, and MinIO/S3.
- An Erlang/OTP real-time robot-control system (Butler Core) running on GCP VMs, using Mnesia, EMQX (MQTT broker), and Cowboy HTTP.
- A hybrid CI/CD setup spanning GitHub (mono-repo for 19 platform services) and Bitbucket (legacy/firmware repositories), with Jenkins, Spinnaker, ArgoCD, Nexus, Terraform, and Ansible.
- Kafka-based event streaming with Avro schema contracts and Redis for payload management.
- An internal context-retrieval server that surfaces runbooks, tickets, deployment history, and architecture docs as LLM-queryable tools.
- An incident management platform (evaluating commercial tools vs. in-house) with a custom compliance evidence layer for SOC2/ISO audits.
- A home-grown Just-In-Time access portal covering GKE, GCP IAM, Kafka ACLs, SQL, Mnesia, and config management, integrated with Google Workspace SSO.
Architecture & Technical Direction:
- Lead cross-team architecture reviews - help the team make large technical decisions, document trade-offs, and land on durable solutions.
- Own build-vs-buy decisions: evaluate commercial tools against in-house alternatives with documented analysis, and live with the consequences.
- Define and enforce engineering standards across the whole team: schema conventions, observability patterns, security postures, secrets hygiene, API design.
- Review system designs across every engineering area the team works in - not just the area you are currently contributing to.
- Partner with the Associate Director on technical hiring: contribute to interview design, loop calibration, and leveling decisions.
Hands-On Engineering:
- Rotate across different engineering domains throughout the year, contributing meaningfully to each - shipping production code, not just reviewing it.
- Write and maintain design documents and architecture decision records (ADRs) - these are required deliverables, not optional write-ups.
- Unblock engineers on hard problems by pairing directly, not by delegating to someone else.
- Build and own cross-cutting libraries, shared tooling, and foundational components that multiple services depend on.
Mentorship & Culture:
- Technically mentor the Staff Engineers - paired design sessions, deep code review, escalation target for hard problems.
- Raise the bar in code review: model the level of feedback and depth of analysis that sets the team standard.
- Drive a blameless engineering culture - incidents and mistakes are learning opportunities, not blame events.
- Treat documentation as first-class engineering output: design docs and runbooks ship with features, not after them.
Requirements:
- 12+ years of software engineering with at least 5 years at Staff Engineer level or equivalent senior IC level.
- Has shipped at least one platform, developer-experience, or infrastructure product at scale that other engineering teams measurably adopted - not just delivered, but adopted and continued to use.
- Production experience across at least four of: Kafka, Kubernetes, GitOps and ArgoCD, Grafana/InfluxDB observability stacks, OAuth2/OIDC identity systems, LLM orchestration or RAG systems.
- Demonstrated build-vs-buy judgment: has made significant make-or-buy decisions, documented the trade-offs, and lived with the outcome.
- Deep system design instincts - can hold a 10+ service distributed system in mind and identify coupling problems and failure modes before they become production incidents.
- Excellent written communication - drives technical influence through documents, not just verbal authority in meetings.
- Comfortable operating as the senior-most IC on a small team where pragmatism and real constraints shape decisions.
Nice to Have:
- Familiarity with Erlang/OTP, Mnesia, or BEAM VM tooling - for context on the Butler Core platform.
- Experience with hybrid deployment environments spanning Kubernetes and traditional VMs in the same production system.
- Has led a technical governance body - architecture review board, RFC process, or equivalent cross-team decision-making forum.
- Background evaluating and procuring engineering tooling at a technical (not just commercial) level.
- Familiarity with VDA5050 or AGV/robotics communication protocols.
Skills
Java, Spring Boot, Microservices Architecture, Kafka, PostgreSQL, Erlang, Distributed Systems, Grafana, Kubernetes, Google Kubernetes Engine