Principal Software Engineer – Platform Engineering

About The Role: 

AlphaSense runs a large-scale, Kubernetes-native platform built on a modern microservices architecture, serving the majority of the Fortune 500. We're now moving it into a cell-based architecture, where each cell is an independent deployment of the platform, and the cell count is heading from dozens toward hundreds, including private and isolated clouds.

Platform tooling only takes that so far. The rest of the problem is architectural and it sits in the services: how they're structured, how they're bounded, and what they assume about the environment they run in. This role owns that side of the work.

You'll set the architectural direction for how our services scale horizontally across regions, cells and deployment models, and you'll build it rather than specify it. You'll own the environments configuration management framework to operate environments as a fleet, and the services and libraries to make it work. Where the answer is a re-architecture rather than a patch, you design it and you write it. Much of it lands in code other teams own, so influence matters as much as design.

The scope is deliberately broad: hundreds of services, several languages, and the latitude to go after whichever scalability limit matters most. Our main languages are Java, Python, React and Rust.

We use AI tooling heavily and expect the same from you, along with a view on how the rest of engineering should be using it.

What You'll Do:

• Drive the service-side changes cell architecture needs: re-architecture, shared library, etc. 
• Decompose hundreds of microservices into sub-systems with independent lifecycles
• Find and close horizontal scalability gaps across regions, cells and deployment models
• Own the environments application configuration management framework end-to-end
• Own the services and libraries specific to private and isolated cloud deployments
• Design and land changes directly in product services, partnering with the teams that own them
• Set the architecture patterns and reference implementations product teams build against
• Make configuration a runtime concern rather than something baked into service code
• Partner with Cloud Platform, SRE and DevEx on where the service and platform boundary should sit
• Raise the architectural bar across the org and mentor Staff and Senior engineers
• Embed AI tooling into day-to-day development for lasting productivity gains

Who You Are: 

• Deep hands-on architecture experience in large microservice estates, at least in hundreds
• Strong in Java and Python, and willing to contribute to other tech stacks if needed 
• Track record decomposing large service estates into sub-systems that can evolve independently
• Proven experience designing for horizontal scalability across regions and independent deployments
• Experience with cell-based, multi-tenant or multi-region architectures
• Strong cloud-native background: Kubernetes, containers and AWS
• Experience externalising configuration and removing environment coupling from application code
• Demonstrated ability to land significant changes in code owned by other teams
• A record of spotting architectural limits before they turn into incidents
• Ability and desire to design, lead, influence and deliver on ambitious technical roadmaps

Nice to have: 

• Experience with Vespa
• Experience with private, isolated, on-premise or air-gapped deployments
• Design and stewardship of shared libraries or internal frameworks used by many teams