Principal Platform Engineer: Cloud, API & IoT Leader

NRG Energy, Inc.; United States; On-site; USD 225,000 - 285,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Paid holidays

Employee discounts

Medical/dental/vision/life coverage &

401(k) + Employer Match

Employee Resource Groups

Quarterly Innovation Weeks

Job summary

Vivint Smart Home, an NRG owned company, seeks a Principal Platform Engineer to set architectural direction for core cloud services, event pipelines, APIs, and IoT integrations powering millions of connected homes. This senior IC role requires hands-on coding and hands-on leadership across Seattle teams.

You will mentor engineers, shape platform standards, and collaborate with Product and Security to align roadmaps with business priorities.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field, or equivalent experience
• 10+ years of experience building and operating production systems, including several years as a technical lead at the staff or principal level
• Expert-level skills in Go, Python, Java, or similar backend languages
• Track record designing and operating large-scale distributed systems with high availability and low latency
• Deep experience with cloud-native infrastructure: containers, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and GCP or AWS
• Experience setting technical direction across multiple teams and driving adoption of standards without direct authority
• Strong written and verbal communication; able to explain trade-offs to both engineers and senior leadership

Responsibilities

• Define the technical strategy and multi-year architecture for core platform services, event pipelines, and APIs
• Lead the design of high-scale, low-latency distributed systems that process real-time events from millions of devices
• Own cross-team technical decisions: author and review design documents and resolve trade-offs across mobile, backend, embedded, and data teams
• Set standards for reliability, security, observability, and operability, including SLOs, production readiness, and incident review
• Stay hands-on: build prototypes and critical components, and lead resolution of the hardest production issues
• Identify systemic technical debt and platform risks, and drive plans to address them, including build-vs-buy decisions
• Mentor senior and staff engineers, help set the hiring bar, and establish engineering culture for the Seattle team
• Partner with Product, Security, and engineering leadership to align the platform roadmap with business priorities

Skills

Backend languages

Distributed systems

Cloud-native infra

Leadership influence

Communication

Go

Python

Java

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/SE

Tools

Kubernetes

CI/CD

AWS

GCP

Datadog

OpenTelemetry

Kafka

Job description

Vivint Smart Home, an NRG owned company, seeks a Principal Platform Engineer to set architectural direction for core cloud services, event pipelines, APIs, and IoT integrations powering millions of connected homes. This senior IC role requires hands-on coding and hands-on leadership across Seattle teams.

You will mentor engineers, shape platform standards, and collaborate with Product and Security to align roadmaps with business priorities.