Principal Software Engineer, Platform Enablement

Principal Software Engineer, Platform Enablement

About Shippo

At Shippo, our vision is bold and clear:
we are the shipping layer of the internet. Our mission is to make every merchant successful through excellent shipping, delivering world-class logistics technology and infrastructure. We’re building the backbone of global e-commerce — connecting merchants to carriers worldwide through a single API and intuitive dashboard.

As a remote-first and globally distributed team , we believe flexibility fuels trust, autonomy, and performance. Our diverse perspectives — across continents, cultures, and time zones — drive our innovation and enable us to build solutions used by businesses everywhere. We invest in modern, scalable technology so our teams can build, ship, and iterate with confidence.

Your impact starts here: every person at Shippo plays a direct role in shaping the infrastructure that powers global commerce and makes shipping simpler for businesses around the world.

How we will deliver success together:

Shippo is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead our Platform Enablement organization, which encompasses Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Engineering Enablement (Developer Experience), and Security teams. This is a highly visible, strategic role that will shape how hundreds of engineers build, deploy, and operate software  will own the technical strategy and architecture for our platform capabilities, driving consistency across our infrastructure while accelerating product team velocity.

As a Principal Engineer, you'll balance deep technical work (prototyping, building critical tooling) with broad organizational influence (architecture decisions, mentoring senior engineers, establishing standards). You'll navigate complex trade-offs between cloud cost optimization, security hardening, and developer velocity. This role reports to the Director of Engineering and is a key role in driving engineering culture and technical direction across the organization.

• Define and drive the multi-year technical strategy for Shippo's platform capabilities across cloud infrastructure, developer experience, and security
• Establish architectural guardrails and governance frameworks that enable teams to move fast while maintaining security and reliability
• Design high-level systems that solve significantly complex problems involving cloud infrastructure, deployment pipelines, and security tooling
• Partner with Staff Engineers across Engineering to ensure clear ownership, system boundaries, and operational health
• Establish company-wide engineering standards for infrastructure, deployment practices, and security by default
• Create organizational mechanisms (templates, service catalogs, automated guardrails) that ensure teams maintain excellence without requiring direct oversight
• Drive stronger application standards through self-service tooling and golden paths; reduce platform fragmentation and prevent siloed solutions
• Identify and eliminate systemic organizational barriers that slow engineering velocity or create toil
• Design and deliver solutions that maximize impact across the organization - from cost optimization to security automation to developer productivity
• Conduct early investigation, prototyping, and experimentation to validate approaches before scaling across teams
• Mentor and influence the career growth of Senior and Staff Engineers across platform teams
• Navigate complex trade-offs (cost vs. security vs. velocity) with company-wide implications and drive adoption of difficult decisions
• Partner with Security team to drive automation and secure-by-default practices into engineering workflows
• Drive ownership and cost transparency for platform services that product teams consume
• Maintain tight feedback loops with product teams to ensure platform capabilities directly address pain points
• Lead proactive reviews of operational and system health across platform services
• Produce long-lasting artifacts (talks, documentation, frameworks) that serve as force multipliers for the organization
• Typically split time between shipping code, prototyping, libraries, and tooling (30%) and driving designs and standards in reviews (70%)

Your…