Principal Platform Engineer -Infrastructure Automation & Agentic Engineering

Introduction

Ahold Delhaize USA, a division of global food retailer Ahold Delhaize, is part of the U.S. family of brands, which also includes five leading omnichannel grocery brands - Food Lion, Giant Food, The GIANT Company, Hannaford and Stop & Shop. Ahold Delhaize USA associates support the brands with a wide range of services, including Finance, Legal, Sustainability, Commercial, Digital and E-commerce, Technology and more.

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.

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.

• Reliability and observability. Define SLIs, SLOs, telemetry, traces, dashboards, alerts, run histories, change evidence, and operational health measures for pipelines and agents. Lead troubleshooting and systemic correction for high-impact platform and automation failures.
• Platform lifecycle and resilience. Set and enforce lifecycle practices for provisioning, configuration, patching, upgrades, currency, backup, restore, high availability, disaster recovery, decommissioning, documentation, and operational reporting. Ensure lifecycle risk and recovery readiness are visible in roadmaps and governance decisions.
• Basis Engineering and Definition of Done. Translate domain specifications into pipelines, controls, scorecards, reference implementations, and acceptance criteria. A capability is not done until authoritative inventory and ownership are recorded; supported lifecycle and compatibility are verified; security and privileged-access controls pass; testing covers normal, failure, rollback, and recovery paths; monitoring, logging, SLI/SLO and alert routing are operational;
  Service Now CI, dependency, change and knowledge records are complete; runbooks and support handoffs are current; evidence is retained; and exceptions have accountable owners and expiry dates.
• Technical leadership and organizational capability. Set the technical bar, lead implementation and operational-readiness reviews, coach senior platform leaders and engineers, and strengthen capability across internal and supplier teams. Independently verify completion claims using artifacts, telemetry, CMDB records, test results, monitoring coverage, recovery evidence, financial outcomes, and change results; communicate material risks, trade-offs, and recommendations to senior leadership.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Service Now…