Principal Platform Engineer

Blue River Technology is a team of innovators creating intelligent machinery for various industries. They are seeking a Principal Engineer to provide technical leadership for their CVML and Robotics Data Platform, focusing on data enablement across the robotics development lifecycle.

Responsibilities:

• Own and drive the technical vision, architecture, and standards for data enablement within the CVML and robotics platform
• Serve as technical lead for major initiatives, guiding design, implementation, and delivery
• Mentor and coach Senior and Staff Engineers from a technical standpoint through design reviews, code reviews, and architectural guidance
• Design, build, and maintain scalable APIs and backend services exposing robotics, sensor, simulation, and ML lifecycle data
• Lead development of developer-facing applications and visualizations supporting model training, evaluation, debugging, and deployment workflows
• Architect, build, and operate data pipelines and workflows
• Define and implement infrastructure-as-code with Terraform and Terragrunt
• Establish and evolve observability standards using Prometheus and Grafana
• Partner closely with MLEs, Data Scientists, Robotics Engineers, and Product to translate workflows into robust platform capabilities
• Get hands-on to unblock teams, resolve complex technical challenges, and lead response to high-priority incidents
• Clearly communicate technical decisions, tradeoffs, and architectural rationale to engineering and leadership stakeholders
• Applies a customer-first approach to platform design, ensuring solutions solve meaningful customer problems at scale

Requirements:

• 12+ years of professional software engineering experience, with demonstrated impact at the Staff or Principal Engineer level
• Proven experience serving as a technical lead for senior engineers on complex, distributed systems
• Strong background in building data platforms, internal tooling, or developer platforms
• Expertise in designing and operating APIs and distributed systems at scale
• Hands-on experience with: Python, React, Databricks / Spark, Databases: Postgres, MongoDB, Cloud: AWS, Orchestration: Airflow or similar, Infrastructure as Code: Terraform / Terragrunt, Observability: Prometheus / Grafana
• Strong system design skills and architectural judgment
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills
• Experience supporting machine learning, computer vision, or robotics workflows
• Familiarity with ML lifecycle tooling
• Experience working with robotics or autonomous systems data
• Experience with C++, particularly in performance-critical systems or robotics-adjacent components
• Strong instincts for developer experience (DX)
• Experience influencing technical direction across multiple teams
• Prior people management experience (optional)