Principal Platform Engineer, Core Platform

About the Role

Core Platform is a platform team. Our customers are Charlie Health's other engineering teams, and our job is to make them faster, safer, and more consistent. We don't ship product features. We build the patterns, services, and guardrails that other engineering teams depend on.

As the Principal Platform Engineer on Core Platform, you will be the technical lead for Charlie Health's AI-Native SDLC initiative and own critical architecture decisions. You will enable automated quality checks and AI-driven efficiencies, so velocity and safety improve together as we accelerate parts of the development process. You and your team will be responsible for improving our DORA metrics and the maturity of our engineering organization.

This is a technical leadership role without direct reports. You own the team's technical direction, roadmap, and delivery. You will set direction for a team of Staff and Senior Platform Engineers, make the hardest calls on quality gates and where AI belongs in the lifecycle, and stay hands-on in the work. We build with AI as the default. Plans are the primary input, agents draft most of the implementation, and the quality gates this team owns make it safe in a HIPAA-regulated clinical business.

Responsibilities

• Lead the AI-Native SDLC initiative: quality gates and test foundations, automated and progressively delivered releases, and AI-assisted review, measured by DORA, so we accelerate development safely
• Own the team's roadmap and intake. Balance incoming platform requests and near-term developer pain against long-term architectural investment, with support from Engineering leadership
• Run the team's delivery: planning, refinement, and the cycle cadence, with projects scoped to clear milestones and target dates
• Build authentication and authorization for the platform, including agent identity: scoped, short-lived, audited credentials for non-human principals
• Shape the gradual decomposition of the monolith into services: define the seams, the migration pattern, and the sequencing, and partner with product squads as domains move
• Facilitate the Architecture Advice Guild rituals and provide technical direction on architecture decision records for cross-team decisions and standards
• Raise the bar for plan authoring and agent orchestration on the team, and review agent output with the same rigor you would apply to a senior engineer's work
• Keep the platform services the team operates reliable: SLOs, monitor-gated deploys, incident leadership, and a seat in the on-call rotation
• Drive the technical evaluation for procurement and renewals of our critical platform vendors: evaluations, proofs of concept, usage and cost data, and build versus buy recommendations, partnering with the Director who owns the commercial side
• Mentor Staff and Senior engineers toward larger scope

Requirements

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including ownership of platform or distributed systems architecture at company scale. You have designed, operated, and evolved systems that other teams build on
• Hands-on experience leading a delivery engineering or developer productivity transformation: CI/CD, progressive delivery (canary, automated rollback), and test strategy at scale, measured with DORA, SPACE, or similar
• Experience evolving a large monolith toward services incrementally, and designing the boundaries that made it safe
• Experience with skills, MCPs, harnesses, agentic tooling ecosystems, or agent orchestration for software development
• A track record of technical leadership without people authority. You have aligned multiple teams behind architectural outcomes and developed senior engineers
• Experience owning a team roadmap: intake, prioritization, and delivery planning alongside the architecture work
• You build with AI agents as part of your daily work. You write plans that agents can implement, run agents for real delivery, and know where agent output needs human judgment
• Experience bringing AI into a team's lifecycle beyond personal use
• Proficiency in the stack we run: Python and/or TypeScript services, Postgres, and AWS
• Comfort operating production critical-path systems, including on-call, in a regulated environment
• Clear, direct communication with engineers, leadership, clinicians, and compliance

Nice to Haves

• Auth0 FGA, OpenFGA, or other Zanzibar-style authorization systems in production
• Progressive delivery tooling (Argo Rollouts, feature flags, merge queues) and end-to-end frameworks such as Playwright at scale
• Remote coding agents (Claude, OpenCode, Cursor background agents, or similar) running in a managed environment
• Healthcare data standards (FHIR, HL7v2) and engineering in a HIPAA-regulated environment
• Time as a people manager for senior or staff level engineers
• Prior work on a platform engineering team
• Fluency with domain-driven design or event storming

Benefits

Charlie Health is pleased to offer comprehensive benefits to all full-time, exempt employees. Read more about our benefits here.

The total target base compensation for this role will be between $225,000 and $325,000 per year at the commencement of employment. Please note, pay will be determined on an individualized basis and will be impacted by location, experience, expertise, internal pay equity, and other relevant business considerations. Further, cash compensation is only part of the total compensation package, which, depending on the position, may include stock options and other Charlie Health-sponsored benefits.

#LI-HYBRID #LI-REMOTE