Senior Autonomy Engineering Specialist Platform

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Job Description:

Your Work Shapes the World at Caterpillar Inc.

When you join Caterpillar yourejoining a global team who cares not just about the work we do but also about each other. We are the makers problem solvers and future world builders who are creating stronger more sustainable communities. We dontjust talk about progress and innovation here we make it happen with our customers where we work and live. Together we are building a better world so we can all enjoy living in it.

Senior Principal Software Engineer Platform Engineering

Role Overview

We are seeking a Senior Principal Software Engineer Platform Engineering to lead the architecture evolution and technical direction of enterprise platform capabilities that support mission-critical applications at scale. This is a senior individual contributor role for an experienced engineer who brings deep platform expertise strong architectural judgement and the ability to influence technical strategy across multiple teams while remaining hands-on with complex engineering challenges.

You will play a critical role in shaping modern platform engineering practices across Kubernetes distributed systems platform reliability security and developer enablement. This role is ideal for someone who enjoys solving difficult systems problems driving engineering standards mentoring strong technical teams and building platform foundations that accelerate product delivery and operational excellence.

What Youll Do

Lead architecture and design decisions across platform domains including Kubernetes compute networking storage observability security and production operations.


Define and evolve platform standards reference architectures reusable patterns and technical guardrails that enable scalable reliable and secure systems.


Drive complex technical decisions across availability resiliency scalability fault isolation disaster recovery and lifecycle management.


Shape the direction of Kubernetes-based platform environments including cluster architecture upgrades hardening recovery and operational readiness.


Partner closely with SRE DevSecOps Security Infrastructure and application engineering teams to ensure platform solutions are observable supportable secure and production-ready.


Review major technical proposals design decisions and architecture changes providing clear technical leadership and pragmatic engineering guidance.


Influence long-term platform strategy by identifying technical debt architectural gaps and modernisation opportunities across the platform ecosystem.


Lead troubleshooting and resolution of high-complexity platform issues across distributed systems infrastructure networking storage and runtime services.


Mentor engineers through design reviews technical coaching and architectural problem-solving helping raise the organisations engineering quality bar.


Improve developer productivity and platform effectiveness through automation simplification and modern engineering practices including AI-assisted engineering where appropriate.


What Were Looking For

12 years of experience in software engineering platform engineering infrastructure engineering or distributed systems.


Proven experience designing building and operating large-scale highly available production platforms.


Deep expertise in Kubernetes and container-based platform architecture in production environments.


Strong grounding in distributed systems Linux networking storage system design and platform reliability engineering.


Ability to influence technical direction and drive alignment across teams without depending on formal organisational authority.


Strong architectural thinking sound engineering judgement and the ability to balance long-term platform strategy with practical delivery outcomes.


Bachelors degree in Computer Science Engineering or a related technical field or equivalent practical experience.


Preferred Experience

Experience with on-premises air-gapped edge or self-managed Kubernetes environments.


Experience with infrastructure automation and platform operations practices such as Terraform Ansible or GitOps.


Familiarity with platform security observability service mesh and enterprise infrastructure patterns.

Experience working in a Platform Engineering SRE shared-ownership model.


Experience in industrial autonomy or other mission-critical environments.


Exposure to Generative AI or agentic engineering tools applied to software delivery platform operations or developer productivity.

Posting Dates:

Caterpillar is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Qualified applicants of any age are encouraged to apply

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