Principal Engineer - Platform & Data

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Principal Engineer - Platform & Data based in Canada. This is a senior technical leadership role focused on shaping platform and data architecture across a broad engineering organization. You’ll influence architectural direction while remaining hands-on with design, code, reviews, and technical delivery. The role places particular emphasis on strengthening data architecture and how large-scale platform data is structured, stored, and used. You’ll guide complex decisions around scalability, reliability, performance, resilience, and cloud efficiency. You’ll work across teams to establish standards, clarify ambiguous problems, and turn technical challenges into practical solutions. The position offers broad ownership in a remote engineering environment that values strong judgment, collaboration, continuous learning, and pragmatic execution. You’ll also contribute to technical forums, roadmap planning, governance, and the evolution of engineering practices. Accountabilities: - Shape platform architecture, including platform blueprints, engineering standards, and technical best practices. - Define and evolve data architecture and strategy, including how platform-generated data is structured, stored, processed, and leveraged. - Design and deliver scalable, resilient, robust, and cost-efficient services aligned with established platform architecture. - Remain hands-on in technical delivery through coding, architecture, design reviews, and targeted implementation work. - Identify and resolve complex challenges involving scalability, performance, resilience, reliability, and cloud costs. - Act as a senior technical advisor across engineering teams, influencing decisions and supporting adoption of architectural standards. - Contribute to technical roadmap planning and prioritization of platform improvements.

- Support technical scoping and estimation for complex initiatives and RFPs. - Produce clear technical documentation, architecture artifacts, and decision materials for technical and non-technical stakeholders. - Improve how architecture principles and standards are understood and applied across engineering and the wider organization. - Contribute to technical forums and working groups, including API and architecture governance. Requirements: - Extensive experience designing and evolving distributed systems and microservices architectures. - Previous experience operating at Principal, Staff, Architect, or equivalent senior technical level, with responsibility for technical direction across multiple teams or domains. - Strong ability to remain hands-on and contribute across architecture, design, coding, reviews, and delivery. - Strong experience with cloud platforms, preferably AWS, and modern infrastructure practices. - Proven experience making thoughtful trade-offs involving system scale, reliability, performance, resilience, and cost. - Strong data architecture experience, including data platforms, pipelines, data warehouses, data lakes, or products built on large data stores. - Ability to transform loosely defined business or technical problems into clear, actionable technical approaches. - Strong communication skills and ability to explain complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences. - Experience creating or contributing to engineering standards, architecture patterns, platform blueprints, or broader technical direction. - Strong experience with REST API design in complex, multi-service environments, ideally including understanding of frontend API consumption. - Interest in or exposure to AI-enabled systems and an understanding of their architectural implications in production. - Experience breaking monolithic applications into microservices is a plus.