Principal Engineer, Platform

We are looking for a Principal Engineer to join our Platform Group. As a leading technical expert, you will play a pivotal role in guiding our teams through some of the most complex technical challenges at Smartly. Your influence will be crucial in shaping the technical direction of our platform, identifying critical areas for future investment, and driving execution on initiatives that improve scalability, reliability, and developer productivity. The Platform Group owns the foundational systems that power Smartly's products and engineering organization. This includes large-scale databases, distributed systems, infrastructure capabilities, and platform services that enable our teams to build and operate reliably at scale. The Principal Engineer reports to the Chief Architect and works closely with engineering teams, product leaders, and other stakeholders across the organization. What You Will Do Examples of initiatives you will work on • Define how AI agents can safely and effectively interact with Smartly's platform, data, and internal systems. • Shape the technical vision and architecture of Smartly's automation platform, enabling teams to build and operate automations reliably at scale • Partner with teams building our next-generation data products, helping define the architecture for combining multiple large-scale datasets into a unified and accessible data foundation • Evolve the architecture and operational model of our largest databases, including sharding, replication, and scaling strategies With the team of other Principal Engineers, you will also have a substantial impact on shaping Smartly's technical direction and engineering culture. We expect you to utilize your strengths to the benefit of the development teams you're working with. Responsibilities • Be a strong engineering voice alongside other leaders by advising and driving Smartly's technical vision and strategy, setting and upholding high standards for technical quality, scalability, and operational excellence • Drive execution through architecture, design, and hands-on technical contributions, taking responsibility for delivering large-scale technical initiatives to customers • Expected to remain actively involved in design reviews, prototyping, incident analysis, and implementation of critical technical components. • Lead complex cross-team projects that advance our platform architecture and long-term technical vision • Identify and address scalability, reliability, observability and performance bottlenecks across critical systems • Contribute to sharing learnings and knowledge across the organization, mentoring engineers and raising engineering standards • Participate in our recruitment process and help maintain consistently high engineering standards across teams What We Are Looking For Requirements • 3+ years operating at Staff, Principal, Lead Engineer, or equivalent level, driving technical strategy across multiple teams. • Proven track record leading multi-quarter technical initiatives spanning 3+ engineering teams and delivering measurable improvements in scalability, reliability, developer productivity, or operational efficiency. • 5+ years operating production systems where relational database architecture, scalability, reliability, and performance were critical concerns. (e.g. 99.9%+ availability targets) • Strong understanding of distributed systems and experience making architectural decisions involving consistency, availability, partition tolerance, replication and sharding • Demonstrated success influencing technical direction without direct managerial authority. • A high bar for quality of code, testing, and quality of user experience • Ability to communicate complex technical topics clearly to a wide range of stakehol