Principal Platform Engineer

Principal Platform Engineer

Berlin, Germany — Hybrid

AI SaaS | Internal Developer Platforms | Platform Engineering

Our client, a fast-growing AI SaaS company based in Berlin, is looking for a Principal Platform Engineer to define and evolve the internal developer platform powering its next stage of growth.

This is a senior individual-contributor role for someone who can combine hands-on engineering with organisation-wide technical influence. You’ll shape platform architecture, establish reliable golden paths, and help product teams deliver cloud-native AI services with greater speed, security, and confidence.

What You’ll Be Working On

• Defining the architecture and long-term strategy for the company’s internal developer platform

• Building self-service capabilities for infrastructure provisioning, deployments, observability, and service ownership

• Designing reusable platform services and engineering tooling in Go

• Operating scalable Kubernetes environments supporting customer-facing AI products

• Establishing secure and repeatable cloud infrastructure patterns using Terraform and AWS

• Developing golden paths that reduce cognitive load and improve developer productivity

• Evolving the Backstage developer portal, service catalogue, templates, and platform integrations

• Improving platform reliability, security, observability, and cost efficiency

• Leading technical design reviews and influencing architecture across multiple engineering teams

• Mentoring senior engineers and raising platform-engineering standards throughout the organisation

Experience Required

• 8+ years of experience in Platform Engineering, Cloud Infrastructure, Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, or related roles

• Deep production experience with Kubernetes and cloud-native distributed systems

• Strong AWS architecture and operations experience

• Advanced Terraform and Infrastructure as Code expertise

• Commercial experience building services, automation, or infrastructure tooling in Go

• Experience designing internal developer platforms or self-service infrastructure for multiple product teams

• Proven ability to lead complex technical initiatives without relying on line-management authority

• Strong understanding of networking, security, observability, reliability, and software-delivery practices

Nice to Have

• Hands-on experience with Backstage and its plugin ecosystem

• GitOps experience with Argo CD or Flux

• Experience supporting AI, machine-learning, or GPU-based workloads

• Knowledge of Kubernetes operators, service meshes, or policy-as-code tooling

• OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, or comparable observability experience

• Previous Staff or Principal-level experience within an AI SaaS, Developer Tools, or cloud-platform company