Principal Platform Engineer Seattle, Washington

Gradial is a Seattle-based startup enabling digital experiences at the speed of thought. We empower marketers and creatives to implement their ideas directly, with software that adapts over time. Our platform automates website and design system updates, large-scale migrations to new design systems, and continuous content optimization while adhering to company and product brands.

Backed by world class investors, we’re looking to scale our platform and expand our team. At Gradial, we operate with extreme ownership, bias towards action and critical path planning. We tackle problems from first principles, question assumptions, and find creative solutions. If you want to take risks, work on groundbreaking technology, and see the direct impact of your work, Gradial is where you belong.

As a Principal Platform Engineer at Gradial, you will shape the foundation our platform runs on as we scale. You will work closely with the CTO and engineering team to make our systems faster, more resilient, and easier to operate in a high-growth environment. This is a hands‑on individual contributor leadership role for someone who wants real ownership, high leverage, and the opportunity to define how platform reliability looks at an AI‑native company.

• Own the reliability, scalability, and operational health of Gradial’s production platform.
• Lead the evolution of Kubernetes, CI/CD, observability, and infrastructure as code across the stack.
• Set the standard for how we design, ship, and operate reliable systems.
• Build the tooling and automation that help engineers move faster with more confidence.
• Drive improvements in monitoring, alerting, incident response, and service readiness.
• Partner with engineering to identify scaling risks early and solve them before they slow us down.
• Influence the long‑term direction of our platform across reliability, security, performance, and cost.

• 5+ years of experience in platform engineering, infrastructure, SRE, Dev Ops, or related roles with direct ownership of production systems.
• Proven success designing and operating production‑grade infrastructure in fast‑moving, high‑growth environments.
• Deep expertise in Kubernetes, cloud‑native architecture, and container orchestration.
• Strong experience with infrastructure as code, Git Ops, CI/CD workflows, and modern deployment practices.
• Strong command of observability and reliability fundamentals across metrics, logging, tracing, alerting, and incident response.
• A track record of leading through influence, making sound technical decisions, and raising the bar across engineering teams.

• Familiarity with AI or ML infrastructure, including GPU provisioning, model deployment, or compute‑intensive workloads.
• Experience supporting cloud or multi‑cloud environments with a focus on resilience and scale.
• Comfort with Type Script or Python for internal tooling and operational automation.

• Learn quickly and actively seek out new challenges.
• Embrace AI as a core tool for problem‑solving, creativity and scale.
• Show a strong work ethic, high ownership and bias toward action.
• Communicate clearly, directly and with curiosity.
• Thrive in fast‑paced, hyper‑growth environments where building better > maintaining status quo.

• Meaningful equity and competitive salary
• Fast‑paced environment with autonomy and ownership
• A front‑row seat to building category‑defining AI infrastructure

As an AI‑first company, we prioritize AI literacy as a core competency in our hiring decisions. We’re excited by candidates who thoughtfully apply AI tools in their work, but during interviews we’re focused on you. Over‑reliance on AI‑generated responses during the interview process (especially when it obscures your own voice) will result in disqualification. We want to understand your unique perspective and how you approach challenges, both with and without AI.