{"id":184107,"url":"https://alion.io/job/planetart-principal-staff-engineer-web-platform-2","title":"Principal Staff Engineer - Web Platform","company":{"id":3759,"name":"PlanetArt","domain":"planetart.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/planetart","size_band":"201-500","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Workable","truth_index":null},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Calabasas, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":130000,"max":220000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":220000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Amazon CloudWatch","optional":false},{"name":"Amazon EC2","optional":false},{"name":"Amazon S3","optional":false},{"name":"Apache HTTP Server","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"AWS Lambda","optional":false},{"name":"Linux","optional":false},{"name":"MySQL","optional":false},{"name":"PHP","optional":false},{"name":"Platform Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":true},{"name":"Git","optional":true},{"name":"Slack","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-08-31T00:00:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-08-31","last_verified_at":"2026-10-30T12:44:43Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":60,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":60},"description":"Company and Vision\n\nPlanetArt’s vision is to be the leading seller of personalized and make-on-demand products worldwide. We provide consumers with unmatched tools and content and an unparalleled end-to-end customer experience that result in high-quality, meaningful finished products and memorable celebrations of live events.\nThe company’s brands include the popular FreePrints and FreePrints Photobooks apps and the industry leading SimplytoImpress card and stationery site, as well as Personal Creations, CafePress and ISeeMe! Visit www.planetart.com to learn more about our brands.\nWe have more than 500 team members across multiple offices, primarily in Calabasas CA, San Diego CA, Woodridge IL, Minneapolis, MN and Pleasanton, CA. We also have team members in two company-owned offices in China, as well as in Europe.\nJob Overview\n PlanetArt is seeking a Principal Staff Engineer-Web Platform to serve as a senior technical leader within our engineering organization and a key partner to the VP of Engineering. This is a highly hands-on role focused on building, operating, and scaling high-traffic ecommerce web platforms in a fast-moving production environment.\nReporting directly to the VP of Engineering, this engineer will play a critical role in architecting, developing, troubleshooting, and maintaining our LAMP-based web applications and AWS infrastructure. The ideal candidate is equally comfortable writing production code, diagnosing complex site reliability issues, managing cloud infrastructure, and leading technical problem-solving during high-severity incidents.\nThis role requires strong operational judgment and the ability to independently own production challenges across application, database, infrastructure, and deployment layers. The engineer will collaborate closely with our China-based development organization, serving as a senior US-based technical lead responsible for cross-team coordination, code quality, architectural guidance, and production stability.\nThis is an ideal opportunity for an experienced engineer who thrives in high-scale ecommerce environments and enjoys combining deep application engineering with modern cloud operations and production ownership.\nPLEASE NOTE: Candidates much be local to or willing to relocate to the Calabasas area as we operate on a hybrid work model (3 days onsite, 2 remote)\nWhat You’ll Do\nKey Responsibilities\nFull-Stack Platform Engineering: Design, develop, and maintain scalable features and services across our LAMP-based ecommerce platform, with a strong focus on reliability, performance, maintainability, and operational excellence.\nProduction Operations & Incident Response: Act as a senior technical escalation point for complex production incidents, troubleshooting issues across application, infrastructure, networking, database, CDN, and deployment layers. Lead root cause analysis and drive long-term stability improvements.\nAWS Infrastructure Ownership: Manage and optimize AWS infrastructure, including deployment architecture, scaling strategies, observability, security, disaster recovery, and cost efficiency. Partner closely with DevOps and engineering leadership on operational best practices.\nHigh-Scale Performance Optimization: Monitor and improve application, database, and infrastructure performance for high-traffic consumer web applications. Identify bottlenecks and implement scalable solutions to improve uptime, latency, and system resilience.\nCross-Functional Technical Leadership: Partner with Product, Design, Operations, and Customer Experience teams to translate business requirements into scalable technical solutions and ensure successful project execution.\nGlobal Engineering Collaboration: Work closely with the China-based engineering team to coordinate development efforts, conduct code reviews, align on architectural direction, manage releases, and maintain strong engineering communication across time zones.\nCode Quality & Engineering Standards: Champion high engineering standards through code reviews, testing strategies, documentation, observability, and operational best practices. Drive continuous improvement in system reliability and development processes.\nTechnical Mentorship & Leadership: Provide technical mentorship and architectural guidance across the engineering organization. Influence technical direction through hands-on leadership, strong execution, and collaborative problem-solving.\nRequirements\nWhat You Should Have\nSkills, Qualifications, and Requirements\n Senior-Level Full-Stack Engineering Experience: 5+ years of professional experience building and operating large-scale web applications, including substantial hands-on experience with the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP).\nStrong AWS & Cloud Operations Expertise: Deep hands-on experience with AWS services and production cloud environments, including EC2, RDS, S3, Lambda, CloudWatch, networking, scaling, monitoring, and infrastructure troubleshooting.\nEcommerce & High-Traffic Website Experience: Experience supporting high-volume consumer-facing websites or ecommerce platforms, with a strong understanding of scalability, uptime, performance optimization, and operational reliability.\nProduction Troubleshooting Expertise: Demonstrated ability to diagnose and resolve complex production issues under pressure, including database replication issues, performance degradation, infrastructure failures, deployment issues, and site outages.\nDistributed Systems & Database Knowledge: Strong understanding of distributed web architectures, database performance tuning, replication strategies, caching, queuing systems, and fault-tolerant system design.\nGlobal Team Collaboration: Experience working effectively with offshore or globally distributed engineering teams, with strong communication, coordination, and cross-cultural collaboration skills.\n Chinese Language Skills: Ability to communicate in Mandarin (spoken or written) is highly desirable to facilitate collaboration with our China-based engineering team.\nEngineering Best Practices: Strong understanding of software engineering fundamentals including Git workflows, CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, observability, code review practices, and secure development standards.\nOwnership Mentality: Self-directed engineer with strong operational instincts, excellent judgment, and the ability to independently own critical technical initiatives from design through production support.\nTechnical Leadership: Demonstrated ability to influence engineering direction, mentor developers, and drive technical excellence through hands-on leadership rather than direct people management.\nWhat You Can Expect\nWorking Conditions\nWork is performed in an office environment with low to moderate noise levels.\nPosition requires regular, continuous use of computer.\nPosition requires regular sitting and standing.\nPosition requires regular interaction with team members through the following methods: in-person, phone, Zoom, Slack, or email.\nMay require occasional travel.\nThis is a hybrid position; employees are expected to be in the office three days per week (Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday) with the option of working remotely two days (Wednesday and Friday).\nBenefits\nThe compensation range for this position is $130,000-$220,000 annual salary.\nPlanetArt offers a comprehensive benefits package, including:\nHealth, Dental, and Vision Insurance\nLife Insurance \nPet Insurance \nMental Health Insurance \n401(k) with matching \nComprehensive Time Off Program including Paid Time Off, Sick Days, Paid Holidays, and Floating Holidays \nEmployee Product Discounts","description_format":"text","description_chars":7613,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[{"language":"Chinese","level":"All levels","optional":true}]},"benefits":["Health insurance","Hybrid work","Life insurance","Vision insurance"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":true,"industries":["Gifts, Party Supplies & Souvenirs","Office Supplies & Stationery"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-01T09:56:56Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 2","filings_12m":2,"filings_prev_12m":0,"green_card_filings_12m":0,"median_offered_wage_usd":112500,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-29T16:27:21+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)"],"filings_for_role_12m":1}],"liveness":{"score":31,"band":"fade","label":"Fading","p_open":1,"p_active":0.709,"p_room":0.44,"age_days":60,"expected_fill_days":43,"reasons":["conf:1","velocity","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-10-30T05:48:23Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":220000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/planetart-principal-staff-engineer-web-platform-2","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/planetart-principal-staff-engineer-web-platform-2.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-30T16:18:17Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":4459,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-31T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":3759},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=3759"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fplanetart-principal-staff-engineer-web-platform-2"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fplanetart-principal-staff-engineer-web-platform-2"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fplanetart-principal-staff-engineer-web-platform-2"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/planetart-principal-staff-engineer-web-platform-2\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fplanetart-principal-staff-engineer-web-platform-2"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":184107}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"planetart.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":184107},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. Docs: https://alion.io/developers"}}