Principal Platform Engineer

About Conductor: Conductor is the leading enterprise AEO platform. Today’s top enterprise brands use Conductor to grow authority and visibility in both AI and traditional search engines. From tracking visibility in LLMs to real-time monitoring of technical site health and scaled AI content creation, Conductor provides a single source of truth that fuels digital growth—all from one platform. Conductor is a mission-driven company with a commitment to innovation, customer success, and culture. For Conductor, success is improving the lives of everyone in our orbit—our customers, our customers' customers, our employee-owners, and our communities. Conductor is seeking a Principal Platform Engineer to be a builder, systems thinker and a technical leader. You will evolve our hybrid cloud and bare-metal platform, enabling product and engineering to deliver software faster and more reliably. We run terabyte-scale Elasticsearch clusters, a high-volume CI/CD pipeline ecosystem, and production workloads across thousands of containers, with a strong focus on automation, observability, and resilience. You are an excellent communicator and collaborator, able to align multiple teams and influence technical direction. This is a hands-on, high-impact role where you will shape platform roadmap and best practices across teams, influencing how engineers design, deploy, and operate critical services that power multiple products and business domains. What you'll do (Responsibilities): Define the platform vision and deliver incrementally: Shape and execute platform initiatives across hybrid cloud and bare-metal environments in small, value-driven steps that improve usability and adoption. Establish pragmatic standards for infrastructure, security, and operations, balancing consistency with flexibility. Lead critical platform initiatives : Take ownership of high-impact platform projects, driving them end-to-end from design through implementation. Level up platform engineering : Mentor and elevate platform engineers to grow their skills, raise the technical bar, and foster a culture of excellence in the team. Drive technical decisions and standards: Influence design decisions and promote engineering best practices to build robust, scalable, and maintainable systems. Enable self-service platform capabilities: Build and enhance self-service platform features and workflows to improve developer experience and standardized workflows across traditional, AI, and agentic use cases. Accelerate Continuous Delivery: Streamline CI/CD to enable fast, reliable, and low-friction software delivery, minimizing manual toil and boosting developer velocity. Lead Reliability and Observability Initiatives: Drive reliability and observability initiatives, leading postmortems and implementing SLOs, monitoring, and resilience patterns to strengthen platform stability. Who you are (Required Skills/Abilities): 16–20+ years of overall experience in platform, cloud, or infrastructure engineering, including hybrid cloud and bare-metal environments. Hands-on experience in platform engineering environments, applying first-principles thinking, elevating team output and driving value. Proven experience in both small startups and large, fast-moving enterprises, adapting quickly to diverse organizational dynamics. Track record of applying a product mindset to platform engineering, understanding internal users, and solving systemic issues to enhance productivity and adoption. Strong background in CI/CD, automation, container orchestration, and infrastructure tooling (Kubernetes, Docker, ArgoCD, Terraform). Demonstrated ability to manage production systems end-to-end, combining operational ownership with technical guidance. Applies enterprise-grade security and compliance practices while enabling innovation, ensuring the platform remains secure Experience in operating high-scale distributed applications, with expertise in database technologies (SQL, NoSQL), Elasticsearch, caching layers, an