Principal Platform Engineer
Coforma · Remote (US)
Software Engineering
Partners & Advocates
Public Service & Civic Engagement
Human Rights & Equality
$174,399 -
$187,006
Per Year
Posted 2 hours ago
Featured Job
We are looking for an experienced Principal Platform Engineer to join our internal innovation lab and to help build a state-of-the-art product and developer platform from the ground-up.
The innovation lab is a small, autonomous team building a new product from scratch. We operate with the speed of a startup but the stability of an established company, with the goal of creating a new digital service that may grow into its own offering.
You will be a hands-on subject matter expert within an autonomous team exploring new ideas and building products from scratch, ranging from internal prototypes to net-new digital services that may grow into their own offerings. The Principal Platform Engineer will design and ship services and components with a platform-as-product mindset, while shaping standards for platform reliability, observability, and security in a fast-moving R&D environment. Reporting to our Director of Platform Engineering, you’ll also bring experience in SRE and DevOps best practices, automating infrastructure and engineering operations, DevSecOps expertise, and pragmatic architecture choices that balance speed of learning with long-term maintainability.
This role will be a key voice building the foundational platform for our innovation lab, enabling our teams to quickly test, iterate, and ship new scalable and secure products. The Principal Platform Engineer will contribute to the design of infrastructure, security, tooling, and developer productivity platforms, ensuring that the innovation lab technology foundation is reliable, secure, and a delight for developers and customers to use.
As we grow, you will collaborate across departments to promote Platform Engineering and DevSecOps practices, mentor junior engineers, and help drive an in-house Platform function that matches our product and business goals.
If you’re passionate about improving lives through digital products and services, then Coforma is a great company for you.
$174,399 to $187,006 Annual Salary + Benefits + Growth Potential
Placement within this range will be based on the competency level of the candidate. An offer will be made at one of the following tiers:
- Tier 1 - $174,399.60: Meets minimum qualification and experience requirements. Will need additional guidance and training beyond onboarding to perform key responsibilities of the role.
- Tier 2 - $181,543.68: Experienced and fully competent. Will be able to independently perform key responsibilities of the role once onboarding is completed.
- Tier 3 - $187,006.80: Highly experienced and can perform all responsibilities of the role at a higher level than expected once onboarding is completed.
To honor our company-wide equitable pay system, the posted salary range and corresponding tier salaries are non-negotiable.
This is a US-based remote position open to applicants in the states listed below. Some travel may be required.
To ensure we remain compliant with all state, county, and local employment and tax regulations, applicants must currently reside in one of the following states to be considered for employment with Coforma. This list will be updated periodically as our PeopleOps team works to open up hiring in additional states.
- Arizona
- California
- District of Columbia
- Florida
- Georgia
- Idaho
- Illinois
- Maine
- Maryland
- Massachusetts
- Montana
- Nevada
- New Jersey
- New York
- North Carolina
- Oregon
- South Carolina
- Tennessee
- Texas
- Virginia
- Washington
- Wisconsin
What You’ll Do (Key Responsibilities)
This individual contributor role is a critical piece of our Innovation and Platform strategy. The main responsibilities for this role are segmented into the following sections:
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Platform Engineering:
- 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
-
Site Reliability Engineering and DevOps:
- 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
-
Cloud Infrastructure:
- 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
-
Security:
- 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
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In Your First 30 Days, You Will:
- 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
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After 60 Days:
- 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
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After 90 Days:
- 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
Who You Are and What You’ve Done (Skills and Experience 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)
What You Know (Knowledge Requirements):
- 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
Other:
- Internet: Will prioritize and maintain access to strong, reliable internet for the remote nature of our work, except when on vacation or holiday.
- Security: Will keep the highest security practices to ensure privacy and security of Coforma and client information, given the nature of our work, even when on vacation.
- Travel Flexibility: On request and with advanced notice, will attend in-person events such as meetings, workshops, and trainings as assigned for projects that require it.
- Brand Representation: Will represent Coforma professionally and sincerely, modeling our Company Values in all interactions.
About Coforma
We believe ethical technology begins with responsible innovation.
We’re a remote-first company that values collaboration, inclusivity, transparency, autonomy with accountability, and ethical design processes to facilitate responsible innovation and collaboration.
Our cross-functional team works closely with each other and with our government, nonprofit, and commercial partners to research, design, and build better products and services. From empowering patients navigating surprise medical bills to streamlining the digital claims process for Veterans, we’re dedicated to improving people’s lives through thoughtful technology products and services. Together.
Equal Opportunity & Inclusive Workplace
Coforma is an Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) employer. It's our policy to provide equal employment opportunities to all qualified applicants without regard to race, religion, sex, gender, age, disability, military or veteran status, or any other factors protected under federal, state, or local law.
We're committed to ensuring accessibility and equal opportunity and offering reasonable accommodations to those with disabilities. We adhere to the guidelines set forth by the Americans with Disabilities Act and all relevant federal, state, and local laws concerning disability discrimination and accommodation. To request a reasonable accommodation for the application or interview process, please email [email protected].
About Public Trust and Other Background Investigations
Due to the nature of our client and project work, most roles may require a National Agency Check and Inquiries (NACI), Moderate Background Investigation (MBI), Background Investigation (BI) or other relevant investigations as needed. Additional information regarding background evaluations or investigations can be found on the U.S. Office of Personnel Management website (opm.gov).
