Principal Software Development Engineer, Engineering Excellence

About the position

As Highspot continues to scale rapidly, building a robust and efficient platform is critical to our success. We're looking for an experienced engineer to lead the design, development, and evolution of our cloud-based infrastructure and developer platform. This role focuses on enabling product teams through well-designed, scalable, and secure platform capabilities. You'll be responsible for abstracting away cloud complexity, improving developer workflows, and driving the adoption of modern infrastructure practices. You have deep experience with public clouds (AWS and/or Azure), are an expert in Kubernetes, and have a strong understanding of how to build self-service infrastructure that balances speed with safety.

Responsibilities

• Design and build scalable platform capabilities that empower engineering teams to ship features reliably, securely, and quickly.
• Create and maintain developer-facing tools and paved paths (e.g., CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes platforms, observability stacks, secrets management).
• Implement Infrastructure-as-Code and GitOps patterns to promote consistency, automation, and compliance across environments.
• Collaborate with product, security, and compliance stakeholders to build platform services that meet SLAs and governance standards.
• Drive efforts to standardize and simplify infrastructure across cloud environments (AWS, Azure), enabling secure multi-cloud operation.
• Lead incident response, reliability engineering, and observability improvements that ensure platform uptime and performance.
• Act as a technical mentor and thought leader, guiding teams on infrastructure architecture, platform adoption, and best practices.
• Define and execute on a strategic roadmap to evolve the internal platform in line with company growth and technology direction.

Requirements

• 15+ years of experience in software or infrastructure engineering, with at least 5 years focused on platform engineering or cloud infrastructure at scale.
• Proven success designing and operating internal developer platforms in AWS and/or Azure environments.
• Expert-level experience with Kubernetes, including provisioning, cluster lifecycle management, workload orchestration, and multi-tenant design.
• Strong expertise in Terraform, GitOps tools (e.g., ArgoCD), and CI/CD systems (e.g., GitHub Actions, Spinnaker).
• Deep understanding of cloud networking, IAM, service meshes, and container orchestration at scale.
• Familiar with the CNCF landscape and how to leverage open-source tools to solve platform problems.
• Passion for developer experience. You think about tooling, abstraction, reliability, and feedback loops as core parts of platform success.
• Track record of technical leadership, mentoring, and influencing engineering culture at a large scale.
• Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science or related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience designing and operating Developer Platforms or building platform-as-a-service abstractions.
• Exposure to multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud environments and associated design trade-offs.
• Strong cost optimization and cloud governance expertise.

Benefits

• Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, disability, and life benefits
• Health Savings Account (HSA) with employer contribution
• 401(k) Matching with immediate vesting on employer match
• Flexible PTO
• 8 paid holidays and 5 paid days for Annual Holiday Week
• Quarterly Recharge Fridays (paid days off for mental health recharge)
• 18 weeks paid parental leave
• Access to Coaches and Therapists through Modern Health
• 2 volunteer days per year
• Commuting benefits