Principal Platform Engineer

Your Company:

Feathr is a nonprofit marketing platform trusted by over 1,300 nonprofits. Our purpose-built software helps customers unlock more results, time, and confidence.

Feathr’s platform equips nonprofits with the tools they need to build purposeful connections with their community and grow impact with confidence.

We’re building an amazing culture where dedicated people can do their best work. If you’re ready to grow and help the helpers, you’ve come to the right place.

Base salary $165,000 - $180,000 per year, with up to 12% bonus potential.

Fully remote; health, dental, vision; paid holidays, vacation, sick time; and more.

As a Principal Platform Engineer, you serve as a technical anchor on the Platform Engineering Team. You drive architectural decisions, lead complex initiatives, and raise the bar for how we build and operate infrastructure. You are hands‑on while shaping how the team approaches problems, mentoring engineers, and partnering cross‑functionally to ensure our systems are reliable, secure, and built to scale.

This is a high‑trust, high‑ownership role for an engineer who wants to lead through technical excellence.

• 7+ years of experience in platform engineering, infrastructure management, or a similar role, with a track record of leading complex technical initiatives end to end.
• Demonstrated experience owning and advancing system architecture; not just maintaining existing infrastructure, but meaningfully improving it.
• Professional experience building APIs, writing production‑grade scripts, and making substantive contributions to shared codebases beyond configuration and deployment work.
• Proven ability to influence technical direction and mentor engineers without direct authority.
• Experience collaborating with and presenting to non‑technical stakeholders, translating infrastructure needs into business terms.

• Deep expertise in cloud infrastructure, networking, and/or database management.
• Strong technical expertise in cloud services, networking, and/or database management.
• Solid understanding of security protocols, compliance frameworks, and operational best practices.
• Advanced experience with CI/CD pipelines, containerization (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes), and infrastructure‑as‑code (e.g., Terraform, Ansible).
• Solid understanding of industry standards and compliance requirements, including ISO, SOC, or other relevant certifications.
• Preferred:
  Experience with Elasticsearch and SQL for operational reporting and data visibility.
• Preferred:
  Experience with AI/ML tooling, LLM integrations, or cross‑functional AI enablement initiatives.

• Technical Leadership: You set the standard. You make architectural calls, document your reasoning, and bring others along.
• Strategic Thinking: You understand how infrastructure decisions connect to organizational goals and plan with long‑term needs in mind.
• Problem‑Solving: You are the person others come to when a problem is genuinely hard. You are methodical under pressure and confident making decisions with incomplete information.
• Communication: You write clearly, speak credibly to both technical and non‑technical audiences, and document in a way that actually gets used.
• Mentorship: You invest in the engineers around you through code review, pairing, and feedback that helps people grow.
• Collaboration: You work well across teams and functions, understanding that great infrastructure exists to serve the product and the people building it.
• Adaptability: You stay current, embrace change, and know how to help the team navigate ambiguity.

• Lead the design and implementation of scalable, reliable, and secure system architecture across the platform.
• Serve as a technical decision‑maker on major infrastructure initiatives, ensuring choices are well‑reasoned, documented, and aligned with long‑term goals.
• Identify and drive systemic improvements, proactively surfacing technical debt, reliability gaps, and opportunities to modernize.
• Set and uphold engineering standards for the team, including documentation practices, incident response…