Principal Platform Engineer

Coforma is a remote-first company dedicated to improving lives through ethical technology. They are seeking an experienced Principal Platform Engineer to join their innovation lab, focusing on building a state-of-the-art product and developer platform from the ground-up while promoting best practices in platform reliability and security.

Responsibilities:

• Contribute to our core platform codebase by helping build and maintain shared services such as authentication and identity, API services, and deployment pipelines
• Help research and design a future internal platform portal to catalogue our products and services, and centralize self-service workflows
• Identify areas of developer toil and friction, and design self-service solutions to reduce repetitive tasks and frequent support requests
• Manage CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation for containerized and serverless applications
• Partner with Coforma's growth team to deliver innovative solutions and prototypes on our platform
• Promote a Platform-as-a-Product mindset to accelerate the delivery of solutions for all Coforma departments
• Serve as a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) and DevOps lead for the innovation department, supporting product and platform vision by helping shape an in-house SRE and DevOps practice
• Implement and oversee an observability stack (Grafana, Datadog, OTEL, Sentry, Incident.io) to standardize the monitoring, alerting, incident response, and performance of our products and services
• Collaborate across departments as a subject matter expert (SME) to promote SRE best practices and principles within other Engineering and Delivery teams
• Define Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) to help drive engineering and product excellence, and work cross-functionally to help define customer Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
• Lead and promote best practices of Incident Response and Management (IRM) using modern IRM tools
• Mentor junior Platform, DevOps, and SREs
• Help manage our Google Cloud Platform (GCP) environment with a focus on performance, resiliency, and security
• Use and promote Infrastructure as Code (IaC) such as Terraform or Pulumi for consistent, secure deployments and change management
• Assist developers across engineering teams in their use of cloud infrastructure
• Contribute to the design of high-availability cloud architecture
• Implement shift-left security to help developers ship secure code with minimal friction
• Assist Platform leadership with compliance goals such as SOC 2, HIPAA, NIST 800-53, and other regulatory standards
• Promote secure SDLC and DevSecOps tools and practices
• Build relationships with Platform leadership, Innovation department leads, engineers, and others in the company who you will be collaborating with
• Audit current observability stack and SRE tooling and begin developing a knowledge of our tech stack
• Learn about the SRE, DevOps, and platform needs of other Engineering teams
• Begin developing an idea of what “platform engineering” means for the Innovation team and for the broader company
• Identify core platform components that need to be built to meet the Innovation and Engineering teams’ needs
• Manage day-to-day Platform, DevSecOps, and SRE tasks as our in-house Platform Lead, including owning observability, on-call, incident management, and developer relations
• Collaborate with developers and provide technical leadership and guidance to support the Innovation department’s vision from a platform perspective
• Begin contributing to our codebase, whether for IaC, platform services, or observability tooling
• Establish baselines and standards for monitoring dashboards, telemetry, alerts, and on-call that can be reproduced across diverse Engineering teams
• Ensure Innovation engineers have golden paths to deploy prototypes with minimal friction
• Work with Platform leadership to plan the tooling and architecture for our IDP portal
• Contribute to the broader internal launch of our platform to support company growth and solutions
• Deliver tangible improvements to product velocity and reliability (measured time-to-deploy, time-to-debug, time-to-recovery, latency, uptime, etc.)
• Own SLOs/SLIs and incident management for platform services
• Make recommendations for the growth of an in-house platform practice across the company, and promote the Innovation department’s standards among other Engineering individual contributors
• Lead by example to help Coforma develop the best practices for a scalable and reliable platform of SaaS products

Requirements:

• Minimum of 8 years of experience in Platform Engineering, SRE, and DevOps roles
• 2+ years of experience in senior and technical lead roles in Engineering teams
• Expertise with our core Platform stack: GCP, GitHub, Datadog, Grafana
• Experience building containerized platform services (Javascript, Go, Rust, Python)
• Experience developing and maintaining internal platform tools for developers, owning SLOs, and championing product performance and velocity
• Demonstrated ability to lead incident response, security reviews and remediation, and navigate compliance requirements
• Excellent collaboration, communication, and stakeholder management skills
• Comfortable with ambiguity and able to support experiments, measure outcomes, and adjust course quickly
• Full-time resident of the contiguous United States (must be legally authorized to work in the US now and in the future without sponsorship)
• Observability tools such as Grafana, Datadog, OTEL, Prometheus, Sentry, Incident.io
• IaC expertise (Terraform, Pulumi)
• Containers and orchestration platforms (Docker, Kubernetes), and serverless architectures
• Programming or scripting language (Python, JavaScript, Bash, Go, Rust)
• SRE principles, DevSecOps, and DevEx improvement practices
• Modern CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitHub Actions, Google Cloud Deploy)
• High-traffic consumer web or multi-tenant SaaS environments preferred
• Building blocks of the web (HTTP, HTML, CSS, JS/TS, JSON, SSL) and strong first-principles systems engineering foundations
• Security and compliance implications (SOC 2, HIPAA) for SaaS-style or licensed products, and can design with them in mind