Principal Software Engineer - Internal Platform

Pantheon is a leading company that powers over 300,000 websites globally, serving notable clients such as Google and the United Nations. They are seeking a Principal Engineer for their Internal Platform team to enhance the tools and practices that improve developer efficiency across the organization. The role involves defining technical roadmaps, architecting developer experience systems, and leading AI-powered tooling initiatives.

Responsibilities:

• Define and drive the technical roadmap for Pantheon’s internal developer platform, including self-service tooling, CI/CD infrastructure, and developer enablement programs that reduce friction across the engineering organization
• Architect, build, and evolve core developer experience systems — including internal developer portals, standardized service templates, observability tooling, and AI-assisted development workflows
• Define and own Pantheon’s developer productivity metrics strategy — selecting and evolving frameworks (DORA, SPACE) to measure engineering effectiveness, and translating insights into clear recommendations for engineering leadership
• Partner with engineering teams to identify high-friction areas in the software delivery lifecycle and design iterative, high-impact solutions that measurably improve developer flow and satisfaction
• Lead adoption of AI-powered developer tooling across the engineering organization — evaluating tools, establishing standards, measuring impact, and driving cultural change toward AI-first workflows
• Provide technical leadership across the engineering organization — setting direction, reviewing designs, and raising the bar for quality, reliability, and developer experience
• Mentor and coach engineers at all levels, providing technical guidance and growing engineering talent across the broader organization
• Contribute to an engineering-wide culture of collaboration, continuous improvement, and developer empathy

Requirements:

• 10+ years of software development experience, with significant tenure building platform engineering, developer experience, or developer productivity products
• 5+ years of experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems and developer tooling
• Demonstrated ability to drive measurable improvements in developer productivity and satisfaction across a large engineering organization
• Experience with container orchestration (Kubernetes), CI/CD platforms (GitHub Actions, CircleCI, or similar), and infrastructure-as-code practices
• Proficiency in Go, Python, TypeScript, or equivalent modern languages
• Demonstrated executive presence, with a track record of translating complex technical and data concepts into clear narratives for senior engineering leadership
• Deep expertise in internal developer platform (IDP) design and implementation — including self-service infrastructure, service catalogs, golden path templates, and developer portals
• Experience building and operating CI/CD pipelines and software delivery infrastructure at scale — including build systems, test automation, deployment tooling, and release processes
• Strong understanding of developer productivity measurement — including DORA metrics, SPACE framework, flow metrics, and the ability to instrument, analyze, and act on engineering effectiveness data
• Hands-on experience with AI developer tooling (GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code, or similar) — including evaluating adoption, measuring impact on developer workflows, and governing responsible use at scale
• Proficiency with observability, platform telemetry, and developer experience analytics — integrating signals from Git, CI/CD, incident management, and AI tooling into coherent productivity insights
• Grounding in SRE and production engineering fundamentals — including SLOs, error budgets, toil reduction, and incident response — and an understanding of how reliability principles inform the design of resilient, operationally sound developer platforms
• AI-native engineering practices — including fluency with AI coding assistants and a track record of integrating AI tools into engineering workflows, automation, and architectural decision-making
• Familiarity with agentic and LLM-powered developer tools — including AI code review, PR assistants, automated testing, and developer-facing AI interfaces