Principal Platform Engineer

Altana is the network for trusted trade. Our AI-powered product network empowers governments and businesses to build a more resilient and secure global economy while keeping trade flowing.

The Opportunity at Altana

Altana is looking for a Principal Platform Engineer to be the technical authority for the platform our products run on. This is a senior individual contributor role, reporting to the Senior Director of Platform Engineering, for someone who steers architecture across organizational boundaries rather than inside one team's backlog.

We operate a broad estate. Multi-cloud infrastructure across AWS and Azure, a multi-tenant commercial platform, accredited environments including FedRAMP and IRAP, and dedicated sovereign deployments for national customers. The architecture that holds those together determines how fast every product team can ship, how quickly a new customer comes online, and what our infrastructure costs. You will set the direction for it, and you will have real white space to go after the problems you judge to be the most consequential.

You will be a permanent member of the Platform Engineering leadership team alongside our engineering managers, and you will be the person other engineers across the company come to when a technical question spans more teams than any one of them owns.

Your Responsibilities

• Drive technical decisions and systems architecture across multiple organizations, not only within Platform Engineering, and contribute to company-wide design through existing forums while proposing new ones where they are missing

• Own the platform reference architecture across AWS and Azure and across our commercial, regulated, and sovereign environments, and define the patterns that engineering teams build against

• Translate company strategy into area-level technical strategy, keep it aligned with customer and product outcomes, and communicate the options and tradeoffs upward so leadership can choose with a clear view of the consequences

• Lead the architecture for cross-cutting platform concerns, including ingress and API gateway, authentication and authorization, SSO and RBAC, service-to-service communication, and the conventions that govern them

• Design the provisioning path for new environments and tenants, so that standing up a region, an accredited environment, or a customer tenant is a repeatable process with a known shape and a known timeline

• Set the standard for infrastructure as code, GitOps, Kubernetes configuration, and release engineering across the estate, including where AI-assisted development tooling belongs in platform work, and drive adoption through RFCs, design reviews, and reference implementations rather than mandate

• Create and run the forums that get senior engineers aligned, including design review, and establish the rhythms that keep a broad view of delivery and quality across the area

• Act as a cross-functional partner in planning, validating approaches, costing, and implementation options with product, implementation, and finance stakeholders before commitments are made

• Write and prototype the hard parts yourself, including greenfield platform components and proofs of concept that de-risk a direction before a team commits to it

• Partner with Security and Compliance so that accreditation requirements are a designed-in property of the platform instead of a per-environment effort

• Grow the engineers around you through mentorship, pairing, and review, and raise the technical bar toward staff and principal level work

• Interview and help us hire, including at senior and leadership levels, and represent Altana's technical work with customers, partners, and the wider industry

About You

• 10+ years building and operating cloud infrastructure and platforms, including time as the recognized technical authority for a platform other engineering teams depended on

• A background in SRE or platform engineering, with real ownership of systems that other engineers built on top of

• Production experience building and operating environments in AWS and/or Azure at multi-account, multi-environment scale

• Strong Infrastructure as Code skills with Terraform, OpenTofu, or similar tools

• Deep Kubernetes experience, including cluster management, multi-cluster operations, and the platform abstractions built on top of it

• GitOps as your deployment model, with hands-on experience running ArgoCD, Flux, or equivalent in production

• Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development and agentic coding tools, and a considered point of view on where they belong in an engineering workflow and where they do not

• A working understanding of how regulatory and accreditation constraints shape architecture, including environments where continuous delivery does not apply

• Programming ability in Python, Go, or similar languages. You still write code, and you want to

• A track record of architecture that actually got adopted across teams you did not own, earned through influence rather than authority

• You hold a long-term view, and you can tie a technical decision to what it does to cost, delivery, and the product

• Excellent written communication. Design docs and RFCs are how this role scales

• Self-directed, with good judgment about which problems deserve your attention and which do not

• BS or MS degree in Computer Science, or equivalent experience

This role can be fully remote within the United States or based in our Brooklyn, NY or Washington, DC hub locations, with hybrid work flexibility.

US Salary Range and Benefits

$250,000 - $295,000

The salary range, to the extent specified for this role, is a good faith statement of the minimum and maximum levels of the annual based salary for the position. The base salary offered to a successful candidate will depend on a wide range of compensation factors, including, but not limited to, work experience, education and/or training, critical skills, and/or business considerations. Competitive equity grants are included in the majority of full time offers; and are considered part of Altana's total compensation package. Altana also offers either a discretionary bonus or a variable compensation plan depending on the role. Additionally, Altana offers top-tier benefits for full-time employees, including:

• Flexible Time Off: Altana operates with a Flexible Time Off (FTO) policy that gives you agency over your own time off so you can maximize your work-life balance.

• Parental Leave: We offer industry leading Paid Parental Leave (PPL), providing 14 weeks of leave for non-birthing, adoptive, and foster parents and up to 26 weeks of leave for birthing parents, all paid at 100% of your base salary.

• Health Benefits: We have a full suite of medical, vision, and dental benefits with generous employer contributions, designed to give you flexibility and choice for your individual health situation. Our high deductible health plan is 100% employer paid for employees and supplemented with an employer contribution to your Health Savings Account (HSA). There is also a Flexible Spending Account (FSA) option.

• Supplemental Benefits: Altana provides life, short- and long-term disability, and AD&D insurance coverage, all at no cost to you, so you know that you and your loved ones are covered in case of an emergency.

• 401(k) Savings: Save for and invest in your future using our Guideline 401(k) retirement savings program.

• Commuter Benefits: Save money on your commute by setting aside pre-tax funds for public transit or parking!

• Wellness: Because we value mental and emotional health, every Altana employee has access to a free premium subscription to Calm, the #1 app for meditation, sleep, and mindfulness.

• Pet Insurance: Pets are family too! Keep them healthy with Wishbone insurance and / or our Total Pet vet service and telehealth discount plan.

• Employee Assistance Program: Free access to confidential personal support.

• Dependent Care FSA: You will have access to a Dependent Care FSA, which allows you to set aside pre-tax funds for childcare expenses

The recruiter assigned to this role can share more information about the specific compensation and benefit details associated with this role during the hiring process.

Our Values

Our values are the core beliefs that shape who we are, what we stand for, and how we behave.They form the foundation of Altana’s culture and integrity and guide how we hire, design, build, and connect with each other and our customers.

• Trust: Our customers and partners entrust us with missions of the highest importance. We honor that by keeping our word, meeting commitments, and ensuring every action we take reinforces confidence in us. We rely on each other to deliver, to speak openly, and to hold ourselves accountable.

• Resilience: In a world of uncertainty and complexity, our work must withstand challenges, evolve with conditions, and ensure reliability over time. Resilience is both how we operate and what we deliver. It’s how we respond when things don’t go to plan –– we adapt, we support each other, and we keep moving forward.

• Stewardship: We are stewards of every mission we touch. Because our work impacts lives and futures, we hold ourselves accountable to delivering mission impact and never compromising. Our responsibility extends beyond individual projects to the broader system of global trade. We believe that stewardship starts from within so that we can bring focus, creativity, and excellence to our work. Each of us is personally responsible for fostering a workplace where people can thrive. And we are stewards of the greater good of the company. By holding ourselves and each other accountable, we build a culture of innovation and collective success that reflects the scale of our mission.

• Courage: Courage is what unlocks the seemingly impossible for our customers. It’s the core value that drives us make bold moves and take on big, complicated network problems—the ones others avoid. We know success isn't guaranteed, but we have the audacious vision to believe a solution is possible and to build it. Courage fuels our growth mindset. It means embracing challenges that make us stronger, and it’s demonstrated by how we approach hard conversations and complex projects.

At Altana, we believe that a diverse workforce enables greater creativity, performance, and adaptability. We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer and welcome you to join us as you are. Our employment opportunities and decisions are based on business needs and individual qualifications, without regard to race, color, religious creed, national origin, ancestry, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, genetic information, family care or medical leave status, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by the laws or regulations in the areas in which we operate. We prohibit discrimination and harassment of any type, in any situation.

Offers related to employment at Altana will come from an Altana.ai email address. We will never ask for payment as part of the interview or onboarding process.