Principal Platform Engineer

Powering the world’s payments ecosystem

ACI powers the payments ecosystem – globally, and you power ACI.  You’ll innovate, collaborate, and grow – in an energetic technology culture with decades of proven success.  ACIers – in all roles and levels – are truly your colleagues and many are your friends. Our size and reach allow you to see the global impact of your work. You are visible, your talents are valued, and you are empowered to shape the future of payments.

About the Role

The Principal Platform Engineer is a senior individual contributor and technical leader responsible for shaping, scaling, and governing ACI’s internal platforms as products, not projects. This role operates at the intersection of architecture, developer experience, cloud platforms, DevSecOps, and organizational enablement.

You will define paved roads and golden paths that enable product and delivery teams to move faster with confidence—while operating within clearly defined security, compliance, and financial guardrails. You will also act as a technical multiplier, mentoring senior engineers, influencing architectural direction, and ensuring platform capabilities are designed for scale, reliability, and inner‑sourcing.

Key Responsibilities

Platform Architecture & Technical Leadership

• Serve as a technical authority for platform architecture across build‑time and run‑time domains (CI/CD, Kubernetes/OpenShift, cloud infrastructure, secrets, observability, and delivery tooling).
• Define and evolve reference architectures, platform standards, and design guardrails aligned with enterprise security, compliance, and FinOps expectations.
• Lead architectural design reviews and proactively guide teams away from bespoke or non‑scalable solutions.
• Drive cloud‑agnostic and hybrid designs, supporting customer‑managed, SaaS, and on‑prem deployments.

Platform as a Product

• Treat platform capabilities as products with roadmaps, clear ownership, success metrics, and adoption goals.
• Design and maintain golden paths for common developer workflows (build, test, deploy, operate).
• Partner with Product, Client Delivery, and Engineering teams to reduce cognitive load and delivery friction.
• Ensure platforms are self‑service, automated, and documented, minimizing ticket‑driven workflows.

DevSecOps & Automation

• Lead adoption of everything‑as‑code practices (IaC, policy‑as‑code, pipelines, configuration).
• Embed security, quality, and compliance early (shift‑left) into platform workflows.
• Influence CI/CD standards, testing frameworks, artifact management, and release automation.
• Drive consistency across GitHub, pipelines, branching, and SDLC tooling.

Cloud, Kubernetes & Runtime Platforms

• Provide deep expertise in Kubernetes and OpenShift, including multi‑arch, multi‑cloud, and customer‑managed environments.
• Guide platform support for AWS, Azure, GCP, and Red Hat OpenShift with a consistent operating model.
• Define Day‑0, Day‑1, and Day‑2 operational tooling (installers, upgrades, health checks, DR, secrets rotation).

Mentorship & Inner‑Sourcing

• Act as a mentor and technical coach for senior and staff‑level engineers.
• Set expectations for high‑quality design documentation, ADRs, and knowledge sharing.
• Promote and enable inner‑sourcing, making it easy for product teams to contribute back to the platform.
• Be accountable for onboarding success of new engineers through guidance and technical stewardship.
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