Principal Platform Engineer -Infrastructure Automation & Agentic Engineering

Principal Platform Engineer

The Principal Platform Engineer is an enterprise-level individual contributor within the Technology Infrastructure Hosting team. The role shapes hosting-platform vision, strategy, roadmaps, governance, priorities, investment recommendations, and delivery outcomes for complex, business-critical initiatives across multiple teams and systems. It develops reusable modules, golden paths, self-service capabilities, engineering standards, evaluation methods, and operational controls across Windows Server, Active Directory and identity integrations;

AIX/POWER and Linux; VMware, Nutanix, Hyper-V and related compute; storage, backup, SAN and NAS; middleware; networking and firewalls;
Datadog, Nagios and related observability;
Service Now CMDB, ITSM and workflow integrations; and adjacent infrastructure services. The engineer remains hands-on with code and production systems and converts approved designs, domain standards, runbooks, lifecycle obligations, and recurring work into secure, scalable, reliable, cost-effective, and version-controlled capabilities using IaC, configuration management, CI/CD, deterministic orchestration, and governed AI where it adds value.

This role operates with broad decision-impacting opportunities over platform engineering priorities and outcomes without direct people-management responsibility. It aligns senior leaders and cross-functional stakeholders, establishes governance for consistent delivery, coaches senior technical leaders and engineers, resolves systemic cross-domain problems, and challenges unsupported completion claims with evidence. Engineering-whether manual, scripted, IaC-based, or AI-assisted-must improve scalability, developer and operator experience, reliability, security, lifecycle currency, recoverability, observability, auditability, service and financial outcomes.

Our flexible/hybrid work schedule includes 3 in-person days in our Salisbury, NC office and 2 remote days. Applicants must be currently authorized to work in the United States on a full-time basis.

• Platform strategy and roadmap.
• Governance and portfolio leadership.
• Cross-domain platform engineering.
• Platform product and experience management.
• Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD.
• Runbook-to-automation engineering.
• Generative and Agentic AI for operations.
• Prompt and context engineering.
• Agent harnesses and orchestration.
• Continuous agentic improvement.
• Evaluation and quality engineering.
• Financial and capacity stewardship.
• Security, risk, and compliance by design.
• Reliability and observability.
• Platform lifecycle and resilience.
• Basis Engineering and Definition of Done.
• Technical leadership and organizational capability.

Required Infrastructure Domain Breadth

Windows and identity

Windows Server lifecycle, Active Directory/GPO, DNS, privileged access, patching, configuration baselines, hybrid identity dependencies, Power Shell/DSC and recovery.

AIX and Linux

AIX/POWER, HMC/PowerVM/NIM, RHEL or equivalent Linux, package and kernel lifecycle, SSH/PAM/sudo, Ansible, file system and multipath dependencies, patching and recovery.

Compute and virtualization

VMware vSphere/vCenter/ESXi, Nutanix AOS/Prism, Hyper-V or comparable platforms; capacity, firmware/compatibility, cluster resilience, migration, lifecycle and automation.

Storage, backup and SAN

Block/file/storage services, Fibre Channel zoning and multipath, SAN/NAS lifecycle, backup policy, immutable protection, capacity, replication and tested restore or failover.

Middleware and runtime

Application servers, web tiers, messaging, integration runtimes or comparable middleware; configuration, certificates, dependencies, patching, HA, logging and performance.

Networking and firewalls

IP/DNS/load-balancing dependencies, routing, segmentation, firewall policy, ports and protocols, network change validation, telemetry and rollback coordination.

Observability

Datadog, Nagios or comparable platforms; coverage, tagging, service checks, metrics/logs/traces, SLI/SLO, actionable alerts, dependency suppression, synthetic health and evidence retention.

Service management

Service Now CMDB/Discovery, CI identification and reconciliation, completeness/correctness/compliance, service mapping, catalog/workflow, change, incident, problem and knowledge integration.

Required Qualifications

• 12+ years of progressive infrastructure, platform, site reliability, or infrastructure software engineering experience, including principal-level ownership of complex cross-platform outcomes in large enterprise production environments.
• Demonstrated production experience across at least four hosting-domain groups-Windows/AD; AIX/Linux; VMware/Nutanix/Hyper-V; storage/backup/SAN; middleware; networking/firewalls; observability; and Service Now-with deep hands-on expertise in at least two.
• Hands-on ability to design, code, test, deploy and operate production automation using Python and at least two of Power Shell, Ansible, Terraform/Open Tofu, ARM/Bicep, shell scripting or comparable…