Principal Platform Engineer & Team Lead

Title: Principal Platform Engineer & Team Lead

Position Type: Contract

Location: Remote across USA/ Canada

About the Role

We are building an infrastructure management platform from scratch-and we need a Principal Platform Engineer who builds infrastructure not just designs it. You will own the platforms core infrastructure capabilities: Terraform modules Kubernetes clusters networking bare metal provisioning and the automation that makes infrastructure self-service.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will write Terraform daily debug networking issues configure hypervisors and set the technical bar for infrastructure engineering. You will work alongside a Principal Software Engineer who owns the application stack while you own everything under it.

Key Responsibilities

As a Principal Platform Engineer and infrastructure lead you will:

• Own infrastructure architecture and design for platform capabilities ensuring they meet reliability security and operational requirements across compute storage networking and IAM domains.
• Lead the design and implementation of infrastructure as code using Terraform OpenTofu and similar tools including module design state management and infrastructure automation patterns.
• Define and document golden path workflows for common infrastructure operations establishing standardized processes for provisioning lifecycle management scaling and decommissioning.
• Architect container virtualization and bare metal infrastructure including Kubernetes CNI hypervisors PXE boot and data center infrastructure.
• Design networking and security infrastructure including VPC architecture network policies security groups load balancing and multi-region strategies.
• Drive platform engineering standards for infrastructure as code DevOps practices security hardening and operational procedures ensuring they are adopted across teams.
• Mentor and grow infrastructure engineers providing clear technical direction on platform engineering principles DevOps practices and infrastructure architecture.
• Continuously improve platform capabilities by identifying infrastructure gaps evaluating new technologies and practices and driving adoption of platform engineering principles.

Required Qualifications

• 10 years of infrastructure/platform engineering experience with 4 years in senior/ staff/ principal roles operating production infrastructure.
• Expert-level Terraform and OpenTofu proficiency-module design state management and building reusable infrastructure patterns.
• Deep Kubernetes experience including cluster operations CNI storage classes RBAC and troubleshooting production issues.
• Strong experience with virtualization-hypervisors VM lifecycle and virtualization platform configuration.
• Hands-on bare metal experience including PXE boot provisioning automation and hardware lifecycle management.
• Deep Linux expertise-internals system administration kernel concepts filesystems and process management.
• Strong networking knowledge including VPC design security groups load balancing DNS and firewall configuration.
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure) and their core primitives: compute storage networking and IAM.
• Proficiency with configuration management tools (Ansible Chef or Puppet) and infrastructure automation patterns.
• Experience building observability for infrastructure-metrics logging alerting and operational dashboards.
• Proven ability to own and operate complex infrastructure end-to-end from design through production.
• Track record of mentoring engineers setting infrastructure standards and raising the bar for operational excellence.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building internal developer platforms or self-service infrastructure with guardrails.
• Multi-cloud or hybrid cloud experience with consistent infrastructure patterns across providers.
• Service mesh and advanced container networking experience (CNI network policies).
• Data center operations experience including rack layout cabling and physical infrastructure.
• Experience with backup disaster recovery and snapshot automation strategies.
• Infrastructure security background-hardening vulnerability management and secure design.
• Prior experience at infrastructure or platform engineering companies.