Principal Engineer, Platform

The Role: Want to be a part of our exciting growth journey?

We are looking for a hands-on technical leader to join our Platform Engineering team, where you will set the direction for the cloud infrastructure and developer platforms that every product at Traild is built on.

You will lead a small team of platform engineers while staying close to the code, owning our GCP infrastructure, networking, compute and storage, CI/CD, observability, infrastructure-as-code, developer experience and FinOps.

The ideal candidate brings deep hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure, strong technical judgement to independently shape strategy and direction, and a genuine track record of growing engineers.

Platform Engineering sits at the centre of our technology organisation. When Platform works well, every other engineering team ships faster and more safely. When it does not, everyone feels it.

This is a small team of three, growing to around five. Platform roadmap is yours to define. You define what Platform invests in, what it automates, what it stops doing, and you make that case to the rest of engineering and to the executive team.

This role spans both the architecture and the people, and it's built that way on purpose. You'll sit in design reviews and shape the outcome, pick up a hard problem yourself when it counts, and still show up for five engineers as their manager when it matters. If both halves appeal to you, this is the right role. If you want one and not the other, it is not.

Key Responsibilities

• Set the technical direction and roadmap for Platform and set the case for it directly to the teams who depend on you.
• Own the reliability, performance and cost of Traild’s GCP footprint, including networking, compute, storage and the infrastructure-as-code that describes it.
• Improve the developer experience: CI/CD pipelines, build and deploy tooling, observability, and the day-to-day friction that slows other engineers down.
• Stay hands-on as a working member of the team, rather than an occasional contributor.
• Hold the technical bar through design review, code review, and the standards you set by example.
• Grow and support around five engineers, including hiring as the team expands.
• Own operational health and incident response for the foundations the whole product runs on.

Who You Are

• You have led a small engineering team, or been the most senior engineer on one, and you have stayed technical throughout.
• You have deep experience with cloud infrastructure at production scale, on GCP or AWS. We care more about depth than about which logo is on it.
• You are fluent in infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD and observability, and you have opinions about what good looks like that you can defend.
• You are passionate about platform as a product and can set platform direction: work out what matters, sequence it, and take other people with you.
• You have grown engineers before, formally or informally, and you understand why and how people learn.
• You are a strong communicator who can build trust with senior stakeholders and make technical trade-offs legible to people
• who are not engineers.
• You ship fast and you ship safely.
• Strong collaborator with an attitude embracing growth, hands-on execution, adaptability, and the scale-up spirit.