Principal Platform Engineer (AI & Observability)

Harbor Lab; Kentucky; Hybrid; USD 190,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

30 days of paid annual leave

Private health insurance (family)

Hybrid or Remote work

Life Coach & Kick-Boxing Sessions

Lunch in office

Fitness center discount

Startup environment

Job summary

HarborLab is seeking a senior individual-contributor engineer who will own technical excellence across the platform, reporting to the CTO. You will guide microservices design, system reliability, and observability across teams, while not managing people.

You will bring 10+ years in software development, with hands-on leadership in a fast-growing maritime tech company, and a track record of improving CI/CD, monitoring, and AI-driven development. A hybrid/remote setup is available.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software development experience, with 3+ years as the most senior technical voice in an engineering organisation.
• Deep hands-on experience designing and running microservices in a strongly typed backend language.
• Real experience with event-driven systems and relational databases at scale, incl. SQL and performance work.
• Hands-on experience running workloads on Kubernetes in a public cloud and managing infrastructure as code.
• Track record of measurably improving CI/CD, monitoring and release workflows, not just proposing improvements.
• Working knowledge of SLOs, error budgets and incident management.
• Daily use of AI tools in your own development work and ability to evaluate their outputs.
• Ability to balance pragmatic delivery with long-term technical soundness and explain trade-offs.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical roadmap, debt reduction, reliability, pipelines, observability, and AI tooling with quarterly outcomes.
• Review the product roadmap quarterly, de-risk risky parts before build, and set standards in code/pipeline.
• Raise monitoring maturity, SLOs, incident response, and act as escalation for production.

Skills

Staff/Principal level

Microservices design

Kubernetes

CI/CD improvements

SLOs & incident mgmt

AI tooling

Cloud (AWS)

Relational databases

Tools

Java 17+

Spring Boot

RabbitMQ

PostgreSQL

Kubernetes

Terraform

Grafana

Job description

HarborLab is seeking a senior individual-contributor engineer who will own technical excellence across the platform, reporting to the CTO. You will guide microservices design, system reliability, and observability across teams, while not managing people.

You will bring 10+ years in software development, with hands-on leadership in a fast-growing maritime tech company, and a track record of improving CI/CD, monitoring, and AI-driven development. A hybrid/remote setup is available.