Principal Platform Engineer - AI-Native, Remote-First

Atlan; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-friendly

Equity

Health benefits

Flexible time off

Job summary

Atlan is seeking a Principal Engineer to architect and scale the data plane for AI-enabled apps. You’ll design platform services, champion enterprise-scale architectures, and mentor senior engineers across teams in a high-ownership, high-agency environment.

You’ll work on lakeshouse, vector stores, graph databases, and OLTP systems, with 99.99% availability targets, across a global, remote-first organization.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in platform engineering, infrastructure, or backend systems at a SaaS company
• Experience building enterprise-scale distributed systems at scale
• Deep expertise in multi-tenant architectures and tenant isolation strategies
• Strong Kubernetes, containerization, and cloud infrastructure skills (AWS/GCP/Azure)
• Hands‑on experience with distributed systems patterns - service mesh, event‑driven architecture, orchestration
• Track record of driving multi‑quarter technical initiatives from concept through production at scale

Responsibilities

• Design and build platform services - APIs, infrastructure components, runtime systems, and ingestion frameworks at enterprise scale
• Architect the context store that transforms lakehouse infrastructure into AI-ready systems with multimodal capabilities (structured, unstructured, vector, graph)
• Solve complex multi-tenant isolation and scaling problems for enterprise SaaS
• Design data contracts governing ingestion, validation, processing, routing, storage, and serving across heterogeneous systems
• Own critical shared infrastructure including lakehouse (Iceberg/Polaris), vector stores, graph databases, and OLTP systems
• Drive technical standards through RFCs, architecture reviews, and documentation
• Mentor senior engineers and influence architecture decisions across teams
• Write production code using AI-assisted development tools (Claude Code, Cursor)
• Debug distributed systems issues across Kubernetes, workflow orchestration, and microservices

Skills

Platform engineering

Kubernetes

Cloud infra

Multi-tenant

Distributed systems

Async comms

Architectural leadership

Mentoring

RFCs

SaaS

Tools

Iceberg

Polaris

Vector stores

Graph DBs

Job description

Atlan is seeking a Principal Engineer to architect and scale the data plane for AI-enabled apps. You’ll design platform services, champion enterprise-scale architectures, and mentor senior engineers across teams in a high-ownership, high-agency environment.

You’ll work on lakeshouse, vector stores, graph databases, and OLTP systems, with 99.99% availability targets, across a global, remote-first organization.