Principal Platform Engineer

Altana is the network for trusted trade. Our AI-powered product network empowers governments and businesses to build a more resilient and secure global economy while keeping trade flowing.

Altana is looking for a Principal Platform Engineer to be the technical authority for the platform our products run on. This is a senior individual contributor role, reporting to the Senior Director of Platform Engineering, for someone who steers architecture across organizational boundaries rather than inside one team's backlog.

We operate a broad estate. Multi-cloud infrastructure across AWS and Azure, a multi-tenant commercial platform, accredited environments including FedRAMP and IRAP, and dedicated sovereign deployments for national customers. The architecture that holds those together determines how fast every product team can ship, how quickly a new customer comes online, and what our infrastructure costs. You will set the direction for it, and you will have real white space to go after the problems you judge to be the most consequential.

You will be a permanent member of the Platform Engineering leadership team alongside our engineering managers, and you will be the person other engineers across the company come to when a technical question spans more teams than any one of them owns.

• Drive technical decisions and systems architecture across multiple organizations
  , not only within Platform Engineering, and contribute to company-wide design through existing forums while proposing new ones where they are missing
• Own the platform reference architecture across AWS and Azure and across our commercial, regulated, and sovereign environments, and define the patterns that engineering teams build against
• Translate company strategy into area-level technical strategy
  , keep it aligned with customer and product outcomes, and communicate the options and tradeoffs upward so leadership can choose with a clear view of the consequences
• Lead the architecture for cross-cutting platform concerns
  , including ingress and API gateway, authentication and authorization, SSO and RBAC, service-to-service communication, and the conventions that govern them
• Design the provisioning path for new environments and tenants
  , so that standing up a region, an accredited environment, or a customer tenant is a repeatable process with a known shape and a known timeline
• Set the standard for infrastructure as code, Git Ops, Kubernetes configuration, and release engineering across the estate, including where AI-assisted development tooling belongs in platform work, and drive adoption through RFCs, design reviews, and reference implementations rather than mandate
• Create and run the forums that get senior engineers aligned
  , including design review, and establish the rhythms that keep a broad view of delivery and quality across the area
• Act as a cross-functional partner in planning
  , validating approaches, costing, and implementation options with product, implementation, and finance stakeholders before commitments are made
• Write and prototype the hard parts yourself
  , including greenfield platform components and proofs of concept that de-risk a direction before a team commits to it
• Partner with Security and Compliance so that accreditation requirements are a designed-in property of the platform instead of a per-environment effort
• Grow the engineers around you through mentorship, pairing, and review, and raise the technical bar toward staff and principal level work
• Interview and help us hire
  , including at senior and leadership levels, and represent Altana's technical work with customers, partners, and the wider industry

• 10+ years building and operating cloud infrastructure and platforms, including…