Hybrid Principal Platform Engineer

at Smarsh

• Job title: Principal Platform Engineer
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Lead
• Salary: Not specified
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Tech skills: Apache, AWS, Cloud, Distributed Systems, ElasticSearch, Grafana, Java, Kafka, Kubernetes, MongoDB, Prometheus, Python, Terraform
• Location requirements: Hybrid, Bangalore, India

About the role

• Senior technical authority at Smarsh managing large-scale distributed data platforms. Leading architectural design, influencing engineering standards, and mentoring engineers across the organization.

Responsibilities

• Define and evolve the architectural vision and operating standards for large-scale distributed data platforms.
• Lead the design and evolution of highly available, scalable clusters supporting core data technologies including MongoDB, Elasticsearch, and Apache Kafka.
• Solve complex, ambiguous distributed systems problems, balancing trade-offs across scalability, resilience, performance, security, and cost.
• Influence engineering teams to adopt platform standards, automation practices, and self-service capabilities.
• Partner with engineering and product leadership to align platform capabilities with strategic business objectives.
• Establish reliability targets, operational models, and observability standards for stateful workloads on multi-cluster Kubernetes environments.
• Mentor engineers, lead design reviews, and raise the technical bar across the platform organization.
• Contribute as a senior escalation point within the on-call rotation.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience in platform engineering, SRE, or distributed systems-focused roles.
• Demonstrated subject matter expertise in operating at least one of MongoDB, Kafka, or ElasticSearch at high scale, including deep day-2 operational knowledge.
• Significant experience designing and operating large-scale, Kubernetes environments and associated ecosystem tooling (e.g. Helm, Kustomize, ArgoCD etc.). Experience managing stateful workloads on Kubernetes is a significant plus.
• Proven experience defining architectural standards and influencing technical direction across teams.
• Strong programming skills (Python, Java, or similar), with experience building internal platform APIs and automation tooling a significant plus.
• Extensive experience with Infrastructure as Code (e.g. Terraform) and cloud-native deployment models.
• Hands-on experience operating enterprise-scale workloads in AWS.
• Experience designing and evolving observability platforms (e.g. Prometheus/Grafana, ELK) to support multi-cluster environments.
• Strong understanding of security principles and experience embedding security best practices into production environments and code promotion systems.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to influence diverse technical and non-technical stakeholders