Principal Platform Engineer, Core Platform

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 the Principal Platform Engineer on Core Platform, you will be the technical lead for the team building the platform underneath everything Charlie Health ships next: a federated GraphQL front door that fronts every client surface, the event substrate that carries every signal, the identity layer that authenticates every human and every AI agent, and the real-time world model state layer that gives our services and agents a live picture of care. You will be foundational in a replatforming effort, and the primitives you design become the platform's paved roads.

This is a technical leadership role without direct reports. You own the team's technical direction, roadmap, and delivery. You will set direction for a team of Staff and Senior Platform Engineers, make the hardest design calls of the replatforming, and stay hands-on in the work. We build with AI as the default. Specs are the primary artifact, agents draft most of the implementation, and the quality gates this team owns are what make that safe in a HIPAA-regulated clinical business.

Responsibilities

• Own the team's roadmap and intake. Balance incoming platform requests and near-term developer pain against long-term architectural investment, with support from the Director of Platform Engineering and the CTO
• Set the technical direction for the Core Platform team and break the north star architecture into projects the team ships quarter by quarter
• Run the team's delivery: planning, refinement, and the sprint cadence, with epics scoped to clear milestones and target dates
• Architect the federated GraphQL supergraph and govern its schema, including subgraph onboarding standards, contract enforcement, and caching and persisted query posture
• Build authentication and authorization for the platform, including agent identity: scoped, short-lived, audited credentials for non-human principals
• Design, build, and operate the centralized event substrate, including schema governance, dead-letter conventions, and the producer and consumer patterns that make async the default integration path between services
• Guide the technical execution of our strangler-fig migration through to cutover, working with product squads as they move onto the new platform
• Deliver the real-time world model state layer: the stream processing that turns events into state, and the live, low-latency state graph that services and agents query
• Facilitate the Architecture Advice Guild rituals and provide technical direction on architecture decision records for cross-team decisions and standards
• Raise the bar for spec writing and agent orchestration on the team, and review specs and agent output with the same rigor you would apply to a senior engineer's work
• Keep the platform services the team operates reliable: SLOs, monitor-gated deploys, incident leadership, and a seat in the on-call rotation
• Drive the technical evaluation for procurement and renewals of our critical platform vendors: evaluations, proofs of concept, usage and cost data, and build versus buy recommendations, partnering with the Director who owns the commercial side
• Mentor Staff and Senior engineers toward larger scope

Requirements

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including ownership of platform or distributed systems architecture at company scale. You have designed, operated, and evolved systems that other teams build on
• Hands-on experience with GraphQL federation at scale and with event streaming systems such as Kafka, covering design, schema governance, and production operation rather than just consumption
• Experience with skills, MCPs, harnesses, agentic tooling ecosystems, or agent orchestration for software development
• A track record of technical leadership without people authority. You have aligned multiple teams behind architectural outcomes and developed senior engineers
• Experience owning a team roadmap: intake, prioritization, and delivery planning alongside the architecture work
• You build with AI agents as part of your daily work. You write specs agents can implement, run agents for real delivery, and know where agent output needs human judgment
• Proficiency in the stack we run: TypeScript and/or Python services, Postgres, and AWS managed primitives
• Comfort operating production critical-path systems, including on-call, in a regulated environment
• Clear, direct communication with engineers, leadership, clinicians, and compliance
• This role requires 4 days per week in our NYC office.

Nice to Haves

• Real-time stream processing (Flink, Spark, KsqlDB, or similar) and graph databases (Memgraph, Neo4j, Amazon Neptune, Dgraph, or similar)
• Healthcare data standards (FHIR, HL7v2) and engineering in a HIPAA-regulated environment
• Time as a people manager for senior or staff level engineers
• A strangler-fig migration or large platform cutover you have led
• Prior work on a platform engineering 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 $225,000 and $325,000 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.

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