Principal Platform Engineer: Scale IoT & Cloud Systems

Vivint; Washington; Hybrid; USD 225,000 - 285,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible PTO and holidays

Employee Discounts

Medical/dental/vision/life coverage

401(k) + employer match

Employee Resource Groups

Quarterly Innovation Weeks

Job summary

Vivint, an NRG-owned company, is seeking a Principal Platform Engineer to shape the technical direction of its core platform, including cloud services, event pipelines, APIs, and IoT integrations powering millions of homes. This senior IC role will own architecture across teams and boldly tackle the hardest problems in Seattle.

You will mentor staff engineers, set engineering standards for reliability and security, and partner with product and security leadership to align the platform with

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 multi-team staff/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 AWS or GCP
• Experience setting technical direction across multiple teams without direct authority
• Strong written and verbal communication; able to explain trade-offs to engineers and 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 processing real-time events from millions of devices
• Own cross-team technical decisions and review design documents across mobile, backend, embedded, and data teams
• Set standards for reliability, security, observability, and operability including SLOs and incident reviews
• Stay hands-on with prototypes and critical components, leading resolution of production issues
• Identify technical debt and platform risks; drive build-vs-buy decisions
• Mentor senior engineers and help set hiring bar and engineering culture for the Seattle team
• Partner with Product, Security, and engineering leadership to align platform roadmap with business priorities

Skills

Go

Python

Java

Distributed systems design

Strong communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/SE or related field

Tools

Kubernetes

CI/CD

AWS

GCP

Kafka

REST/gRPC

MQTT

Datadog/OpenTelemetry

MongoDB

FFmpeg

Job description

Vivint, an NRG-owned company, is seeking a Principal Platform Engineer to shape the technical direction of its core platform, including cloud services, event pipelines, APIs, and IoT integrations powering millions of homes. This senior IC role will own architecture across teams and boldly tackle the hardest problems in Seattle.

You will mentor staff engineers, set engineering standards for reliability and security, and partner with product and security leadership to align the platform with