Principal Software Engineer - Internal Platform

Pantheon is a company that powers over 300,000 websites globally and is seeking a Principal Engineer for their Internal Platform team. The role involves shaping tools and practices to enhance developer productivity and experience across the organization, with a focus on internal developer platforms and AI integration.

Responsibilities:

• Define and drive the technical roadmap for Pantheon’s internal developer platform, including self-service tooling, CI/CD infrastructure, and developer enablement programs that reduce friction across the engineering organization
• Architect, build, and evolve core developer experience systems — including internal developer portals, standardized service templates, observability tooling, and AI-assisted development workflows
• Define and own Pantheon’s developer productivity metrics strategy — selecting and evolving frameworks (DORA, SPACE) to measure engineering effectiveness, and translating insights into clear recommendations for engineering leadership
• Partner with engineering teams to identify high-friction areas in the software delivery lifecycle and design iterative, high-impact solutions that measurably improve developer flow and satisfaction
• Lead adoption of AI-powered developer tooling across the engineering organization — evaluating tools, establishing standards, measuring impact, and driving cultural change toward AI-first workflows
• Provide technical leadership across the engineering organization — setting direction, reviewing designs, and raising the bar for quality, reliability, and developer experience
• Mentor and coach engineers at all levels, providing technical guidance and growing engineering talent across the broader organization
• Contribute to an engineering-wide culture of collaboration, continuous improvement, and developer empathy

Requirements:

• 10+ years of software development experience, with significant tenure building platform engineering, developer experience, or developer productivity products
• 5+ years of experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems and developer tooling
• Demonstrated ability to drive measurable improvements in developer productivity and satisfaction across a large engineering organization
• Experience with container orchestration (Kubernetes), CI/CD platforms (GitHub Actions, CircleCI, or similar), and infrastructure-as-code practices
• Proficiency in Go, Python, TypeScript, or equivalent modern languages
• Demonstrated executive presence, with a track record of translating complex technical and data concepts into clear narratives for senior engineering leadership
• Deep expertise in internal developer platform (IDP) design and implementation — including self-service infrastructure, service catalogs, golden path templates, and developer portals
• Experience building and operating CI/CD pipelines and software delivery infrastructure at scale — including build systems, test automation, deployment tooling, and release processes
• Strong understanding of developer productivity measurement — including DORA metrics, SPACE framework, flow metrics, and the ability to instrument, analyze, and act on engineering effectiveness data
• Hands-on experience with AI developer tooling (GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code, or similar) — including evaluating adoption, measuring impact on developer workflows, and governing responsible use at scale
• Proficiency with observability, platform telemetry, and developer experience analytics — integrating signals from Git, CI/CD, incident management, and AI tooling into coherent productivity insights
• Grounding in SRE and production engineering fundamentals — including SLOs, error budgets, toil reduction, and incident response — and an understanding of how reliability principles inform the design of resilient, operationally sound developer platforms
• AI-native engineering practices — including fluency with AI coding assistants and a track record of integrating AI tools into engineering workflows, automation, and architectural decision-making
• Familiarity with agentic and LLM-powered developer tools — including AI code review, PR assistants, automated testing, and developer-facing AI interfaces