Principal Platform Engineer

At U.S. Bank, we’re on a journey to do our best. Helping the customers and businesses we serve to make better and smarter financial decisions and enabling the communities we support to grow and succeed.  We believe it takes all of us to bring our shared ambition to life, and each person is unique in their potential. A career with U.S. Bank gives you a wide, ever-growing range of opportunities to discover what makes you thrive at every stage of your career. Try new things, learn new skills and discover what you excel at—all from Day One.

Job Description

The Principal Platform Engineer provides strategic technical leadership across the organization, driving scalable architecture, engineering excellence, and platform reliability. This role influences design decisions, fosters a culture of quality and agility, and ensures alignment with business and technical strategies.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect Scalable, Future-Ready Systems
  Provide architectural direction that balances current business needs with long-term scalability. Guide teams in applying design patterns that support iterative, autonomous development and minimize future rework.
• Drive Strategic Engineering Initiatives
  Define the architectural roadmap and align engineering investments with business value. Evaluate ROI and set strategic objectives that shape technical direction across the platform.
• Champion Developer Enablement and Delivery Excellence
  Establish and evolve delivery methodologies that promote fast, safe, and secure releases. Foster a culture of high-quality code reviews, thoughtful release planning, and minimal production disruption.
• Lead Incident Response and Operational Resilience
  Promote a debugging mindset and lead cross-team incident response. Select tools and define processes that support effective troubleshooting and platform reliability.
• Elevate Quality and Testing Standards
  Define testing strategies aligned with the testing pyramid. Use quality metrics to identify gaps and guide teams toward best practices in test automation and validation.
• Embed Security and Compliance into Platform DNA
  Partner with security teams to shape and promote a security-first culture. Ensure platform decisions align with compliance requirements and proactively manage risk.
• Coach, Align, and Foster Accountability
  Mentor teams on architectural trade-offs, technical debt, and prioritization. Promote ownership, clarify cross-team dependencies, and ensure alignment with enterprise goals.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree, or equivalent work experience
• Eight or more years of relevant experience

Preferred Skills/Experience

• Expertise in performance, scalability, enterprise architecture, and agile practices
• Strong knowledge of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and platform engineering
• Experience with observability tools (monitoring, logging, tracing)
• Excellent problem-solving, communication, and leadership skills
• Proven ability to collaborate and influence across teams
• Strategic understanding of team domains and business alignment

Location Expectations

The role offers a hybrid/flexible schedule, which means there's an in-office expectation of 3 or more days per week and flexibility to work outside the office location for the other days.

If there’s anything we can do to accommodate a disability during any portion of the application or hiring process, please refer to our disability accommodations for applicants.

Benefits: 

Our approach to benefits and total rewards considers our team members’ whole selves and what may be needed to thrive in and outside work. That's why our benefits are designed to help you and your family boost your health, protect your financial security and give you peace of mind. Our benefits include the following (some may vary based on role, location or hours):

• Healthcare (medical, dental, vision)

• Basic term and optional term life insurance

• Short-term and long-term disability

• Pregnancy disability and parental leave

• 401(k) and employer-funded retirement plan

• Paid vacation (from two to five weeks depending on salary grade and tenure)

• Up to 11 paid holiday opportunities

• Adoption assistance

• Sick and Safe Leave accruals of one hour for every 30 worked, up to 80 hours per calendar year unless otherwise provided by law

U.S. Bank is an