Principal Platform Engineer - Real-Time IoT & Cloud

Vivint; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 225,000 - 285,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k) + Employer Match

Paid holidays

Medical/dental/vision/life coverage

Employee Resource Groups

Quarterly Innovation Weeks

Job summary

Vivint is seeking a Principal Platform Engineer in Seattle to drive the technical direction of core cloud services, event pipelines, APIs, and IoT integrations. You will own architecture decisions and set standards for reliability and security across multiple teams.

The role is senior and hands-on, mentoring engineers while shaping the platform roadmap. You will collaborate with Product, Security, and leadership to balance technical excellence with business priorities and help scale a growing

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

Go

Python

Java

Distributed systems

Cloud-native

Kubernetes

CI/CD

GCP or AWS

Communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Eng or related

Tools

Kubernetes

CI/CD

GCP

AWS

Datadog/OpenTelemetry

NoSQL (MongoDB)

Kafka

REST/gRPC

Job description

Vivint is seeking a Principal Platform Engineer in Seattle to drive the technical direction of core cloud services, event pipelines, APIs, and IoT integrations. You will own architecture decisions and set standards for reliability and security across multiple teams.

The role is senior and hands-on, mentoring engineers while shaping the platform roadmap. You will collaborate with Product, Security, and leadership to balance technical excellence with business priorities and help scale a growing