Staff/Principal Platform Engineer

About the Role

Core Platform is a platform team. Our customers are Charlie Health's other engineering teams, and our job is to make them faster, safer, and more consistent. We don't ship product features. We build the patterns, services, and guardrails that other engineering teams depend on.

As a Staff Platform Engineer on Core Platform, you will own our Core Services for our system and one of the pillars of our AI-Native SDLC initiative: quality gates and test foundations, safe automated delivery, or AI-assisted development. You will take your area from design through production operation, and the patterns you set become the team's paved roads.

Every engineer is a tech lead, and as a Staff engineer you are a domain owner: people come to you with the hardest technical decisions in your area, and you make calls that hold up across team boundaries. You will work alongside a team of experienced engineers who own the platform primitives. We build with AI as the default. Plans are the primary input, agents draft most of the implementation, and the quality gates this team owns make it safe in a HIPAA-regulated clinical business.

Responsibilities

• Own one or more platform or SDLC primitives end to end, from architecture and build through production operation and long-term evolution
• Build the deterministic quality gates that let agent-written code ship safely: automated end-to-end testing, golden test datasets, and schema change safety
• Roll out AI code review safely, and contribute to the organization’s best-practices guide for AI-assisted development
• Deliver core services on the team's own paved roads, finding the potholes before any product squad does
• Mature authentication and authorization standards across the platform, including agent identity: scoped, short-lived, audited credentials for non-human principals
• Write plans that name invariants, error cases, security implications, and acceptance criteria, and orchestrate agents across hard multi-PR work
• Coach Senior engineers and product squad engineers on agentic engineering best practices and platform patterns
• Define the reliability conventions for your area: SLO definitions, observability standards, and incident response practice, including a seat in the on-call rotation
• Steward the security and compliance posture of your primitive, and stay aware of what it costs to run
• Document the standards in your domain as architecture decision records and bring them through our Architecture Advice Guild

Requirements

• At least 7 years of software engineering experience, including several years designing and operating distributed systems or platform components that other teams build on for staff level and at least 10 years of experience for principal level
• Depth in at least one of these areas: test automation at scale (unit and integration standards, end-to-end coverage of critical flows, flake control), enabling AI code review at scale, or authorization systems with ReBAC and RBAC models (Auth0 FGA, Zanzibar, OpenFGA, Cedar, or similar)
• Experience with skills, MCPs, harnesses, agentic tooling ecosystems, or agent orchestration for software development
• You build with AI agents as part of your daily work. You write plans that agents can implement, run agents for real delivery, and know where agent output needs human judgment
• Experience with data modeling for systems of record, including safe schema changes against live production data
• Proficiency in the stack we run: Python and/or TypeScript services, Postgres, and AWS
• A track record of driving workstreams that span multiple engineers and quarters without people authority
• Comfort operating production critical-path systems, including on-call, in a regulated environment
• Clear, direct communication with engineers, product partners, and leadership
• You live within a 75-minute commute of our NYC office (near Union Square) and are able to work in-office 4 days per week

Nice to Haves

• Progressive delivery tooling (feature flags, canary deployments) and end-to-end frameworks such as Playwright at scale
• Healthcare data standards (FHIR, HL7v2) and engineering in a HIPAA-regulated environment
• An incremental monolith-to-services migration you led
• Time on a platform or developer experience team
• Fluency with domain-driven design or event storming

Benefits

Charlie Health is pleased to offer comprehensive benefits to all full-time, exempt employees. Read more about our benefits here.

The total target base compensation for this role will be between $210,000 and $345,000 per year at the commencement of employment. Please note, pay will be determined on an individualized basis and will be impacted by location, experience, expertise, internal pay equity, and other relevant business considerations. Further, cash compensation is only part of the total compensation package, which, depending on the position, may include stock options and other Charlie Health-sponsored benefits. #LI-HYBRID