Principal Platform Engineer
First seen by Alion on Sep 14, 2026.
Al Khobar, KSA / Hybrid | Full-time | Principal individual contributor | Reports to VP Engineering
About the company:The company is a construction-technology company headquartered in Al Khobar, KSA. We build a connected-worker platform for large construction and industrial sites. Smart helmets, anchors, and gateways feed a real-time SaaS platform that supports worker location, safety compliance, automated mustering, and productivity analytics across major GCC projects.
About the role:As Principal Platform Engineer, you will be the senior individual contributor accountable for the platform's technical integrity. You will set architecture, make critical implementation contributions, and lead across boundaries through design quality and earned technical trust.
This is not an engineering-management role. You will not own hiring, performance cycles, or sprint administration. You will mentor engineers, establish contribution standards, unblock hard technical work, and partner with engineering management and Product on sequencing and team health.
What success looks like - first 6 months:You understand architecture, ownership boundaries, open decisions, and production risks deeply enough to lead a walkthrough of any core platform area.
The most consequential platform decisions are captured in clear architecture decision records, with explicit trade-offs and evidence.
The AIP layer - including agent runtime, MCP surface, and AI-powered product capabilities - has a coherent technical direction and at least one production-shaped vertical slice.
The contribution standard is operational: scoped issues, reviewable changes, clear component boundaries, reliable tests, and links between implementation and architecture.
You have delivered a material platform capability or de-risked a major architectural uncertainty through working software and measurable validation.
Engineering, Product, Hardware, Field Engineering, and leadership trust your technical judgment and understand the platform direction.
Architecture across ontology and semantics, governed pipelines and lineage, streaming and data sources, SDK and API surfaces, authorization and governance, application services, and release infrastructure.
Architecture decision records for consequential platform choices, revisiting old decisions when evidence or implementation pressure indicates a better path.
The technical direction of WC3's AI-native capabilities, including agent runtime design, MCP interfaces, retrieval, tool use, output evaluation, and responsible-AI controls.
Engineering standards that allow multiple contributors and teams to change the platform safely.
Design and implement production capabilities across the stack, spending substantial time in code, prototypes, reviews, debugging, and system validation.
Define and evolve domain models and ontology patterns that connect workers, devices, sites, events, rules, and customer workflows.
Design governed data pipelines with clear contracts, lineage, replay behavior, quality checks, and operational ownership.
Build secure, stable API and SDK surfaces for internal teams, partners, customers, and AI agents.
Make pragmatic data-store choices across relational, time-series, streaming, search, and vector workloads.
Drive the current C#/.NET backend while reasoning credibly across Go, Python, Java, Node.js, and TypeScript when the product requires a different trade-off.
Raise engineering maturity through automated testing, CI gates, release safety, observability, service-level objectives, incident learning, and migration discipline.
Embed security and compliance into design and implementation, including data residency, encryption, audit logging, access control, tenant isolation, and responsible-AI guardrails.
Mentor senior engineers, review designs and code, create reference implementations, and help contributors earn ownership of platform areas.
Collaborate with Product, Hardware, Field Engineering, customers, and partners to connect architecture choices to real site outcomes.
10+ years of software engineering experience, including sustained impact at Staff, Principal, Lead Architect, or equivalent senior individual-contributor scope.
A track record of designing and delivering scalable, multi-tenant SaaS platforms or large distributed systems in production, including incidents, migrations, and scaling failures.
Experience owning a platform across its lifecycle from architecture and implementation through deployment, operation, and evolution.
Deep backend and distributed-systems judgment, with strong hands-on ability in at least one of C#/.NET, Go, Python, Java, or Node.js and credible range across others.
Strong API design skills across REST and/or GraphQL, OpenAPI or SDK code generation, and secure identity patterns such as OAuth 2.0, JWT, and SSO.
Cloud and delivery experience with GCP and/or AWS, containers, Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD, observability, and production operations.
Experience with ontology-driven or governed platforms such as Palantir Foundry/AIP, Databricks Unity Catalog, or equivalent first-principles work with ontologies, pipelines, lineage, governed SDKs, and applications.
Hands-on experience with LLM integration patterns such as prompting, retrieval, tool or function calling, MCP, agent runtime design, and output evaluation.
Principal-level influence through technical writing, architecture facilitation, mentorship, and alignment without direct authority.
Exceptional written and spoken English, including precise issues, ADRs, design documents, reviews, and stakeholder communication.
Direct, hands-on Palantir Foundry and/or AIP experience on a live production surface.
Agentic frameworks, multi-agent orchestration, or durable workflow systems.
IoT or connected-device ingestion, device-to-cloud communication, and high-volume event processing.
Enterprise integrations including identity providers, ERP systems, project-management platforms, Oracle, or Procore.
The companyPrincipal Platform Engineer
Al Khobar, KSA | Full-time | Principal individual contributor | Reports to VP Engineering
About the CompanyThe company is a construction-technology company headquartered in Al Khobar, KSA. We build a connected-worker platform for large construction and industrial sites. Smart helmets, anchors, and gateways feed a real-time SaaS platform that supports worker location, safety compliance, automated mustering, and productivity analytics across major GCC projects.
About the roleAs Principal Platform Engineer, you will be the senior individual contributor accountable for the platform's technical integrity. You will set architecture, make critical implementation contributions, and lead across boundaries through design quality and earned technical trust.
This is not an engineering-management role. You will not own hiring, performance cycles, or sprint administration. You will mentor engineers, establish contribution standards, unblock hard technical work, and partner with engineering management and Product on sequencing and team health.
What success looks like - first 6 monthsYou understand architecture, ownership boundaries, open decisions, and production risks deeply enough to lead a walkthrough of any core platform area.
The most consequential platform decisions are captured in clear architecture decision records, with explicit trade-offs and evidence.
The AIP layer - including agent runtime, MCP surface, and AI-powered product capabilities - has a coherent technical direction and at least one production-shaped vertical slice.
The contribution standard is operational: scoped issues, reviewable changes, clear component boundaries, reliable tests, and links between implementation and architecture.
You have delivered a material platform capability or de-risked a major architectural uncertainty through working software and measurable validation.
Engineering, Product, Hardware, Field Engineering, and leadership trust your technical judgment and understand the platform direction.
Architecture across ontology and semantics, governed pipelines and lineage, streaming and data sources, SDK and API surfaces, authorization and governance, application services, and release infrastructure.
Architecture decision records for consequential platform choices, revisiting old decisions when evidence or implementation pressure indicates a better path.
The technical direction of WC3's AI-native capabilities, including agent runtime design, MCP interfaces, retrieval, tool use, output evaluation, and responsible-AI controls.
Engineering standards that allow multiple contributors and teams to change the platform safely.
Design and implement production capabilities across the stack, spending substantial time in code, prototypes, reviews, debugging, and system validation.
Define and evolve domain models and ontology patterns that connect workers, devices, sites, events, rules, and customer workflows.
Design governed data pipelines with clear contracts, lineage, replay behavior, quality checks, and operational ownership.
Build secure, stable API and SDK surfaces for internal teams, partners, customers, and AI agents.
Make pragmatic data-store choices across relational, time-series, streaming, search, and vector workloads.
Drive the current C#/.NET backend while reasoning credibly across Go, Python, Java, Node.js, and TypeScript when the product requires a different trade-off.
Raise engineering maturity through automated testing, CI gates, release safety, observability, service-level objectives, incident learning, and migration discipline.
Embed security and compliance into design and implementation, including data residency, encryption, audit logging, access control, tenant isolation, and responsible-AI guardrails.
Mentor senior engineers, review designs and code, create reference implementations, and help contributors earn ownership of platform areas.
Collaborate with Product, Hardware, Field Engineering, customers, and partners to connect architecture choices to real site outcomes.
10+ years of software engineering experience, including sustained impact at Staff, Principal, Lead Architect, or equivalent senior individual-contributor scope.
A track record of designing and delivering scalable, multi-tenant SaaS platforms or large distributed systems in production, including incidents, migrations, and scaling failures.
Experience owning a platform across its lifecycle from architecture and implementation through deployment, operation, and evolution.
Deep backend and distributed-systems judgment, with strong hands-on ability in at least one of C#/.NET, Go, Python, Java, or Node.js and credible range across others.
Strong API design skills across REST and/or GraphQL, OpenAPI or SDK code generation, and secure identity patterns such as OAuth 2.0, JWT, and SSO.
Cloud and delivery experience with GCP and/or AWS, containers, Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD, observability, and production operations.
Experience with ontology-driven or governed platforms such as Palantir Foundry/AIP, Databricks Unity Catalog, or equivalent first-principles work with ontologies, pipelines, lineage, governed SDKs, and applications.
Hands-on experience with LLM integration patterns such as prompting, retrieval, tool or function calling, MCP, agent runtime design, and output evaluation.
Principal-level influence through technical writing, architecture facilitation, mentorship, and alignment without direct authority.
Exceptional written and spoken English, including precise issues, ADRs, design documents, reviews, and stakeholder communication.
Direct, hands-on Palantir Foundry and/or AIP experience on a live production surface.
Agentic frameworks, multi-agent orchestration, or durable workflow systems.
IoT or connected-device ingestion, device-to-cloud communication, and high-volume event processing.
Enterprise integrations including identity providers, ERP systems, project-management platforms, Oracle, or Procore.
Company offers a competitive salary, performance bonus, equity participation, principal-level autonomy, relocation support for candidates joining from outside KSA, health insurance, annual flights, and standard benefits. offers a competitive salary, performance bonus, equity participation, principal-level autonomy, relocation support for candidates joining from outside KSA, health insurance, annual flights, and standard benefits.