Principal Platform Engineer, Altana
$250-295k
Competitive equity grants are included in the majority of full time offers; and are considered part of Altana's total compensation package
More information about location
Supply chain visibility platform
Be an early applicant
Supply chain visibility platform
201-500 employees
Be an early applicant
$250-295k
Competitive equity grants are included in the majority of full time offers; and are considered part of Altana's total compensation package
More information about location
201-500 employees
Company mission
Altana AI's mission is to improve global commerce.
Role
Who you are
- 10+ years building and operating cloud infrastructure and platforms, including time as the recognized technical authority for a platform other engineering teams depended on
- A background in SRE or platform engineering, with real ownership of systems that other engineers built on top of
- Production experience building and operating environments in AWS and/or Azure at multi-account, multi-environment scale
- Strong Infrastructure as Code skills with Terraform, OpenTofu, or similar tools
- Deep Kubernetes experience, including cluster management, multi-cluster operations, and the platform abstractions built on top of it
- GitOps as your deployment model, with hands-on experience running ArgoCD, Flux, or equivalent in production
- Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development and agentic coding tools, and a considered point of view on where they belong in an engineering workflow and where they do not
- A working understanding of how regulatory and accreditation constraints shape architecture, including environments where continuous delivery does not apply
- Programming ability in Python, Go, or similar languages. You still write code, and you want to
- A track record of architecture that actually got adopted across teams you did not own, earned through influence rather than authority
- You hold a long-term view, and you can tie a technical decision to what it does to cost, delivery, and the product
- Excellent written communication. Design docs and RFCs are how this role scales
- Self-directed, with good judgment about which problems deserve your attention and which do not
- BS or MS degree in Computer Science, or equivalent experience
What the job involves
- Altana is looking for a Principal Platform Engineer to be the technical authority for the platform our products run on
- This is a senior individual contributor role, reporting to the Senior Director of Platform Engineering, for someone who steers architecture across organizational boundaries rather than inside one team's backlog
- We operate a broad estate
- Multi-cloud infrastructure across AWS and Azure, a multi-tenant commercial platform, accredited environments including FedRAMP and IRAP, and dedicated sovereign deployments for national customers
- The architecture that holds those together determines how fast every product team can ship, how quickly a new customer comes online, and what our infrastructure costs
- You will set the direction for it, and you will have real white space to go after the problems you judge to be the most consequential
- You will be a permanent member of the Platform Engineering leadership team alongside our engineering managers, and you will be the person other engineers across the company come to when a technical question spans more teams than any one of them owns
- Drive technical decisions and systems architecture across multiple organizations, not only within Platform Engineering, and contribute to company-wide design through existing forums while proposing new ones where they are missing
- Own the platform reference architecture across AWS and Azure and across our commercial, regulated, and sovereign environments, and define the patterns that engineering teams build against
- Translate company strategy into area-level technical strategy, keep it aligned with customer and product outcomes, and communicate the options and tradeoffs upward so leadership can choose with a clear view of the consequences
- Lead the architecture for cross-cutting platform concerns, including ingress and API gateway, authentication and authorization, SSO and RBAC, service-to-service communication, and the conventions that govern them
- Design the provisioning path for new environments and tenants, so that standing up a region, an accredited environment, or a customer tenant is a repeatable process with a known shape and a known timeline
- Set the standard for infrastructure as code, GitOps, Kubernetes configuration, and release engineering across the estate, including where AI-assisted development tooling belongs in platform work, and drive adoption through RFCs, design reviews, and reference implementations rather than mandate
- Create and run the forums that get senior engineers aligned, including design review, and establish the rhythms that keep a broad view of delivery and quality across the area
- Act as a cross-functional partner in planning, validating approaches, costing, and implementation options with product, implementation, and finance stakeholders before commitments are made
- Write and prototype the hard parts yourself, including greenfield platform components and proofs of concept that de-risk a direction before a team commits to it
- Partner with Security and Compliance so that accreditation requirements are a designed-in property of the platform instead of a per-environment effort
- Grow the engineers around you through mentorship, pairing, and review, and raise the technical bar toward staff and principal level work
- Interview and help us hire, including at senior and leadership levels, and represent Altana's technical work with customers, partners, and the wider industry
Our take
Altana’s platform provides a shared source of truth for the global supply chain. The idea is that this will help businesses and governing powers optimize global commerce which, over the past few years, has shot up on the list of international priorities. With three quarters of businesses reporting recent supply chain disruptions, and governments increasingly concerned with mitigating security threats, data-driven visibility is more sought after than ever before.
Crucially, the platform doesn’t require data sharing to create global intelligence, instead using a federated machine learning approach. This is a nut many big-data companies have been trying to crack, and Altana’s success has attracted interest from top-tier investors like Google Ventures and Floating Point alongside contracts with the UK Department of Business & Trade. A number of other headline enterprises and government agencies are already on the company's customer roster.
With companies looking to recoup some of the $4T reportedly lost in supply chain disruptions over recent years, and the push for global databases getting stronger, logistics startups are having a fruitful investment period. Altana is crafting a remarkable product at a highly marketable time, and with partnerships with the likes of Maersk, it has had good uptake so far. Backed by substantial funding, Altana is set for a strong few years.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
26% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
Jul 2024
$200m
SERIES C
Oct 2022
$100m
SERIES B
Total funding: $323.5m
Company benefits
- Competitive base salary: We offer competitive base salaries to recognize the incredible work our employees do.
- Learning & development: We support your development through regular performance check-ins and offer financial support for Learning and Development initiatives.
- Health benefits: We offer full global benefits, including a 100% employer-paid plan and tax-advantaged HSA and FSA options in the US.
- Paid time off: We provide a generous PTO policy, including paid sick time, to support your well-being in and out of the office.
- Equity program: We instill ownership by offering competitive new hire equity grants, plus the opportunity to gain more equity along the way.
- Parental leave: We offer up to 26 weeks of fully paid parental leave to support you and your family.
Company HQ
Financial District, New York, NY
Leadership
Raphael Tehranian
(Co-Founder & COO)Previously an analyst with J P Morgan, pivoting to engagement at Cleantech Group and then corporate tech strategy with Suncor Energy. After a spell as an investor at Fuller Smith, spent time with global supply chain analytics company Panjiva as a management advisor.
Peter Swartz
(Co-Founder & Chief Science Officer)An MIT grad in political science who went on to work as Head of Data Science at Panjiva.
Evan Smith
(Co-Founder & CEO)A Yale economics graduate with experience in renewables at Imperium Renewables and Verno Systems, the latter of which they co-founded. Served as a partner at Fuller Smith, before moving on to work in a management advisor role at Panjiva.
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