Principal Engineer- Platform Services

Job Description

As a Principal Software Engineer on the Platform Services team, you will serve as the senior technical authority for the services layer of the Certent Equity Management (CEM) platform—a portfolio of services spanning data processing, file transfer, financial data feeds, communications, compliance, and shared infrastructure. Reporting to the Engineering Manager, you will own the reliability, observability, and modernization of these services across multiple production ecosystems.

This is a pure individual contributor role. Your responsibility is to write high‑quality code, make sound architectural decisions, and drive the technical evolution of a mission‑critical platform that was recently migrated to Azure and is now entering a cloud‑native modernization phase. You will be the go‑to technical voice for platform reliability, resilience, and shared engineering standards on the Platform Services Team, partnering closely with the Scalable Architecture Team as they define future‑state design patterns.

The services you own span a wide range of modernization stages—some recently refactored, others carrying significant technical debt. Your immediate focus is improving reliability and resilience in the current state by reducing fragility, improving observability, and ensuring production stability across multiple ecosystems. Longer term, you will partner with the Scalable Architecture Team to define the appropriate cloud‑native future state and sequence the modernization of legacy services toward that vision.

You are expected to bring an AI‑first mindset by genuinely integrating agentic development tooling into your daily workflow and setting the technical standard for the team.

Platform Reliability & Observability

• Own and evolve the platform’s observability posture, including structured logging, distributed tracing, health check endpoints, and correlation tracking, ensuring consistent adoption and coverage across all services.
• Drive SLO and SLI definition and dashboard creation, expanding alerting beyond log‑based alerts to include APM metrics, latency, and throughput.
• Identify and eliminate reliability anti‑patterns across the service portfolio, replacing fragile legacy approaches with resilient, cloud‑native alternatives.
• Implement resilience patterns such as circuit breakers, retry policies, graceful degradation, dead‑letter handling, and idempotent message processing.
• Replace legacy messaging anti‑patterns, including database polling and file‑system coupling, with event‑driven messaging infrastructure—the highest‑impact reliability improvement available to the platform.

Technical Ownership & Architecture

• Serve as the senior technical authority for the Platform Services portfolio, owning architecture, reliability, and engineering quality across a broad set of production services.
• Assess the current service portfolio, identify the highest‑impact reliability and modernization opportunities, and build a sequenced roadmap in partnership with the Scalable Architecture Team and Engineering Manager.
• Evaluate and recommend the appropriate cloud‑native Azure services and patterns for the platform’s future state—this is an open architectural question, not a predetermined path.
• Own shared libraries and cross‑cutting infrastructure used across the service portfolio, ensuring consistent adoption of engineering standards.
• Ensure production stability across multiple independent deployment ecosystems throughout modernization efforts.

Legacy Modernization

• Create and execute migration paths for legacy services across multiple .NET framework generations, prioritizing the highest‑risk services and sequencing work to minimize production disruption.
• Partner with the Scalable Architecture Team to ensure modernization decisions align with long‑term platform direction and emerging design patterns.
• Evaluate and sequence modernization priorities across a diverse portfolio, balancing production stability with long‑term architectural investment.

Hands‑On Engineering

• Write, review, and contribute production‑quality code across the services portfolio, including C#/.NET, Oracle SQL and PL/SQL, and cloud…