Senior Principal Engineer - Platform Engineering

Senior Principal Engineer, Platform Engineering

Fastly’s Platform Engineering team builds the foundations that enable engineers to ship quickly, safely, and reliably at scale. As a Senior Principal Engineer, you will set technical direction and lead cross‑organizational initiatives that strengthen our platform, developer experience, and operational excellence. You’ll partner closely with Engineering peers to remove friction, standardize best practices, and deliver paved roads that accelerate product teams. This is a highly cross‑functional and hands-on role representing the Platform Engineering org, reporting to the Senior Director of Engineering.

What You'll Do:

• Lead architecture and technical direction for Platform Engineering initiatives spanning build, deploy, runtime, observability, Security and developer experience
• Partner with Engineering, SRE, Security, and Product teams to align roadmaps, priorities, and success metrics across the company
• Drive cross‑org programs from concept to delivery (e.g., service templates/golden paths, CI/CD modernization, reliability and cost efficiency improvements)
• Define and evolve platform standards (APIs, operational readiness, SLOs/SLAs, incident learnings) and ensure adoption through tooling and enablement
• Mentor and amplify senior engineers and tech leads; raise the bar for design reviews, technical writing, and engineering rigor
• Communicate progress, risks, and decisions clearly to stakeholders and leadership; represent Platform Engineering in technical forums

What We're Looking For:

• 12+ years of related professional software engineering experience, including designing and operating distributed systems in production
• Demonstrated success leading complex, cross‑functional technical initiatives with broad organizational impact
• Deep expertise in at least two of: cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes/container platforms, CI/CD systems, networking/service connectivity, observability, security, developer tooling
• Strong systems design and architecture skills with a pragmatic approach to tradeoffs, risk management, and incremental delivery
• Excellent written and verbal communication; ability to influence without authority and align diverse stakeholders
• Commitment to building diverse and inclusive teams and an environment where engineers can do their best work

We’ll be super impressed if you have experience in any of these:

• Experience building internal developer platforms or “paved roads” at scale (e.g., service catalogs, self‑service infrastructure, standardized delivery pipelines)
• Background in high‑performance networking/edge/CDN systems or globally distributed traffic platforms
• Strong SRE practices: SLOs, error budgets, incident response, and continuous improvement loops
• Experience with infrastructure‑as‑code (e.g., Terraform)