- Arcadia
- United States,
- Full-Time
- 14 days ago
- $250,000–$350,000
Principal Software Engineer - Platform.
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Principal Software Engineer - Platform: our view in 3 lines...
- The Role:Principal engineer role focused on platform engineering for healthcare software built on data and Kubernetes.
- The Person:The person will build self-service platform APIs, templates and golden paths, improve delivery and reliability controls, manage migrations and stakeholder trade-offs, and coach senior engineers on technical direction.
- Requirements:The ideal candidate brings cloud, Kubernetes, networking and IaC experience, plus reliability work with SLOs, observability, on-call and incident response.
About the role
Why This Role Is Important to Arcadia
As our business grows, and as AI is improving, we need fewer, better building blocks: less per-team glue, more self-service capabilities every team builds on, so engineers spend their time on customers instead of plumbing. This is platform engineering at Arcadia. The role could just as well be titled Developer Platform, DevEx, DevProd, or SRE.
Arcadia builds and operates the petabyte-size lakehouse, and the client-facing applications that run on Kubernetes. The role will span both, reporting directly to the engineering VP.
What Success Looks Like
Arcadia engineers and their agents rely on platform building blocks, from services and pipelines to databases, queues, and storage, that come wired in with logging, metrics, tracing, alerts, encryption, access controls, backups, and cost tags, with sensible defaults.
Teams change their own pipelines, environments, alerts, and SLOs. When something breaks, the owning team sees it first, traces it to the change that caused it, and rolls it back themselves. They see their own delivery numbers and cloud spend, and act on them. Platform upgrades reach them as a merged pull request, not a checklist. Engineers take the paved road because it's the fastest way to production, and platform engineers spend their time building capabilities, not working tickets.
Why This Role Is Important to Arcadia
As our business grows, and as AI is improving, we need fewer, better building blocks: less per-team glue, more self-service capabilities every team builds on, so engineers spend their time on customers instead of plumbing. This is platform engineering at Arcadia. The role could just as well be titled Developer Platform, DevEx, DevProd, or SRE.
Arcadia builds and operates the petabyte-size lakehouse, and the client-facing applications that run on Kubernetes. The role will span both, reporting directly to the engineering VP.
What Success Looks Like
Arcadia engineers and their agents rely on platform building blocks, from services and pipelines to databases, queues, and storage, that come wired in with logging, metrics, tracing, alerts, encryption, access controls, backups, and cost tags, with sensible defaults.
Teams change their own pipelines, environments, alerts, and SLOs. When something breaks, the owning team sees it first, traces it to the change that caused it, and rolls it back themselves. They see their own delivery numbers and cloud spend, and act on them. Platform upgrades reach them as a merged pull request, not a checklist. Engineers take the paved road because it's the fastest way to production, and platform engineers spend their time building capabilities, not working tickets.
What You'll Be Doing
- Push quality attributes into the platform, especially as AI increases the volume of changes: test and regression gates, progressive delivery and fast rollback, supply-chain and policy checks in the pipeline, and cost that's visible and attributable to the teams.
- Run the platform as a curated internal product: find what slows teams down, pick the few capabilities worth building, publish the roadmap, and measure adoption, delivery speed, stability, and developer satisfaction.
- Build software: self-service APIs, templates, and golden paths for CI/CD, environments, and observability, so teams get what they need without waiting on anyone. You write a meaningful share of the code.
- Carry the cost of migrations: track usage, automate instead of handing out checklists, push through the final 20%, and sunset.
- Manage the platform's stakeholders: say yes with compromises, say no without breaking trust, bring shadow platforms back onto the paved road, and make cost visible to the teams that generate it.
- Set the technical direction and evolve the platform, and coach Senior Engineers through design partnership and review.

