Principal Engineering Manager (Platform Eng)

We are looking for a Principal Engineering Manager to lead the Content Delivery Platform charter within Vulcan — the layer that serves personalized feeds across surfaces, captures user interactions in real time, and owns the platform's evolution as user behavior and session context reveal new capabilities worth building centrally. This role is closer to running a portfolio of SaaS products than running a team that maintains infrastructure: the charter has a defined catalog of capabilities today, real tenants with real expectations, and explicit guarantees on latency, freshness, availability, and throughput. The defining judgment this role exercises is deciding which user interaction patterns and session-level behaviors are complex enough, and needed across enough surfaces, to warrant becoming first-class platform capabilities — and whether the nature of those capabilities calls for an orchestration layer rather than a serving primitive. The role works closely with product engineering teams as tenants, with the GenAI Inference Platform charter as a peer and dependency, and with the CTO on charter strategy and investment decisions.

Core scope:

Run a capability catalog, not a codebase. The Content Delivery Platform charter is a portfolio of SaaS products — each capability has a defined interface, an SLO, a tenancy model, and a roadmap. Run it accordingly: new capabilities are investment decisions, not engineering requests; deprecations are planned with tenants, not dropped on them; and the catalog is something product teams choose to build on because it makes their work easier and more reliable. Set the standard for what a well-run internal platform product looks like.

Reason about user behavior to drive capability decisions. The charter's most important judgment calls are not architectural — they are about what to build. Analyse how users interact with surfaces, understand what session-level context is being generated, and determine when a pattern of interaction is recurring enough, complex enough, and cross-cutting enough to warrant a centrally-built platform capability. Decide whether a given interaction need is better served by an enhanced serving primitive or by an orchestration layer that connects interaction signals to downstream decisions. Own that call.

Lead a multi-surface, high-scale delivery platform. The charter powers personalized experiences across lock-screen, mobile, and TV for tens of millions of daily active users. It is responsible for the accuracy, freshness, and reliability of what users see. Lead the architectural direction of the serving and personalization stack — not as a hands-on engineer, but as the person who sets the bar, resolves the hard trade-offs, and ensures the platform evolves without fragmentation.

Drive cross-charter alignment with the inference platform. Operate as a peer charter lead alongside the GenAI Inference Platform. Define what the content delivery charter needs from inference — latency, throughput, model availability — and shape those interface contracts early, before they become constraints. The content delivery charter's capability catalog determines what inference capabilities are worth building; make that dependency explicit and managed.

What you will own

• The content delivery platform capability catalog.
• The judgment layer for interaction-driven capabilities.
• Service-level objectives that tenants rely on.
• Charter-level technical direction.
• Team health and organizational growth.
• Roadmap and investment sequencing.
• Operational excellence.

Required experience:

• 12 or more years of experience in software engineering, with meaningful time spent leading teams or charters that built and operated high-scale platform products or shared services used by multiple product engineering teams.
• Track record of running a charter or large engineering organization with tech leads and multiple levels of engineers, including hiring, performance management, growing senior engineers into independent technical decision-makers, and protecting charter focus through sustained roadmap pressure.
• Demonstrated experience defining and holding service-level objectives that mattered to other teams — latency, availability, throughput, personalization freshness, or interaction processing guarantees — and building the engineering culture and operational practices that made those SLOs real.
• Experience building and running self-service capability catalogs that internal tenants discovered, onboarded onto, and adopted on their own — in the spirit of Stripe's internal platforms or Spotify's Backstage. The catalog was adopted because it was genuinely better than the alternative, not because adoption was mandated.
• Strong working knowledge of team topologies and inter-team interaction modes, including when a platform relationship with a tenant or a peer charter requires collaboration, facilitation, or a clean self-service interface, and the willingness to design the charter's human interfaces with the same care as its technical ones.
• Experience with event-driven, real-time systems at consumer scale — interaction event processing, feed serving, personalization pipelines, session management, or re-ranking — where the complexity and cross-cutting nature of a problem determines whether it belongs in the platform or in the product team.
• Architectural depth in distributed systems and platform engineering, including systems at 100K or more QPS, multi-tenant isolation, observability, rollout safety, and the cost and reliability characteristics of platforms handling hundreds of millions of daily events.
• Strong written and verbal communication, including the ability to publish charter direction, communicate capability changes proactively to tenants and leadership, manage expectations across product and engineering leadership, and influence senior stakeholders through clarity and credibility rather than formal authority.