Principal Platform Engineer

Job Overview

As the Nonprofit Marketing Platform trusted by over 1,300 nonprofits, Feathr is purpose-built to help our customers unlock more results, time, and confidence. Feathr's software marketing platform equips nonprofits with the tools they need to build purposeful connections with their community and grow impact with confidence. We're working on building an amazing culture at Feathr, where amazing people (like you) can do their best work. If you're ready to grow and \"help the helpers\" you've come to the right place.

Principal Platform Engineer

As a Principal Platform Engineer, you serve as a technical anchor on the Platform Engineering Team, driving architectural decisions, leading complex initiatives, and raising the bar for how we build and operate infrastructure. You sit at the intersection of deep individual contribution and technical leadership: you're hands-on in the work while also shaping how the team approaches problems, mentoring engineers, and partnering cross-functionally to ensure our systems are reliable, secure, and built to scale. This is a high-trust, high-ownership role for an engineer who wants to lead through technical excellence.

Your Experience

• 7+ years of experience in platform engineering, infrastructure management, or a similar role, with a track record of leading complex technical initiatives end to end.


• Demonstrated experience owning and advancing system architecture; not just maintaining existing infrastructure, but meaningfully improving it.


• Professional experience building APIs, writing production-grade scripts, and making substantive contributions to shared codebases beyond configuration and deployment work.


• Proven ability to influence technical direction and mentor engineers without direct authority.


• Experience collaborating with and presenting to non-technical stakeholders, translating infrastructure needs into business terms.

Technical Requirements

• Deep expertise in cloud infrastructure, networking, and/or database management.


• Strong technical expertise in cloud services, networking, and/or database management.


• Solid understanding of security protocols, compliance frameworks, and operational best practices.


• Advanced experience with CI/CD pipelines, containerization (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes), and infrastructure-as-code (e.g., Terraform, Ansible).


• Solid understanding of industry standards and compliance requirements, including ISO, SOC, or other relevant certifications.


• Preferred: Experience with Elasticsearch and SQL, for operational reporting and data visibility.


• Preferred: Experience with AI/ML tooling, LLM integrations, or cross-functional AI enablement initiatives.

Your Qualities

• Technical Leadership: You set the standard. You make architectural calls, document your reasoning, and bring others along.


• Strategic Thinking: You can zoom out. You understand how infrastructure decisions connect to organizational goals and plan with long-term needs in mind.


• Problem-Solving: You're the person others come to when a problem is genuinely hard. You're methodical under pressure and confident making decisions with incomplete information.


• Communication: You write clearly, speak credibly to both technical and non-technical audiences, and document in a way that actually gets used.


• Mentorship: You invest in the engineers around you through code review, pairing, and feedback that helps people grow.


• Collaboration: You work well across teams and functions. You understand that great infrastructure exists to serve the product and the people building it.


• Adaptability: You stay current, embrace change, and know how to help the team navigate ambiguity.

Your Day

Technical Leadership & Architecture

Lead the design and implementation of scalable, reliable, and secure system architecture across the platform. Serve as a technical decision-maker on major infrastructure initiatives, ensuring choices are well-reasoned, documented, and aligned with long-term goals. Identify and drive systemic improvements, proactively surfacing technical debt, reliability gaps, and opportunities to modernize. Set and uphold engineering standards for the team, including documentation practices, incident response protocols, and operational hygiene.

Infrastructure & Operations

Own and optimize cloud infrastructure, networking, and database systems for high availability and performance. Implement and monitor security protocols to protect systems against vulnerabilities and maintain compliance with applicable standards. Manage and continuously refine CI/CD pipelines to support reliable, efficient software deployments. Lead incident response efforts, diagnosing issues quickly, coordinating resolution, and driving post-incident reviews that prevent recurrence.

Technical Contribution

Make meaningful, hands-on contributions to shared codebases, including tooling, automation, and systems improvements that go beyond configuration work. Debug and resolve complex technical issues, providing direct support for environment setup and system optimization. Develop and maintain internal tools and processes that improve team productivity and system reliability.

AI Enablement

Partner with cross-functional teams to evaluate, integrate, and operationalize AI tooling across the organization. Help establish infrastructure patterns and best practices that support AI adoption at scale.

Mentorship & Team Development

Mentor and coach engineers on the platform team, providing technical guidance, thoughtful code review, and support for professional growth. Help onboard new team members and contribute to building a culture of technical rigor and collaborative problem-solving. Contribute to hiring efforts.