Principal/Staff Platform Engineer

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Principal Engineer, Systems Engineering - Compute Platform
Your Team

The System Operations Platform team is a global engineering organization responsible for building and operating critical compute platform capabilities that power the Aladdin engineering ecosystem. Distributed across multiple regions, the team develops and supports platform products and services that enable developers to build, deploy, and operate applications at scale across on-premises and cloud environments. As BlackRock continues its cloud transformation journey, the team plays a central role in advancing cloud-native platforms, modernizing application deployment models, and delivering platform capabilities that improve reliability, scalability, security, and developer productivity for thousands of engineers worldwide.

Your Role and Impact

As a Principal Engineer, Systems Engineering - Compute Platform, you will serve as a senior technical leader responsible for shaping the future of BlackRock's compute platform strategy. You will define and influence cloud-native and containerization strategies, establish platform engineering standards, and drive modernization initiatives that support the Aladdin platform and its global engineering community.

This role requires a unique blend of deep technical expertise, strategic thinking, and organizational influence. You will partner across engineering organizations to solve complex platform challenges, establish architectural direction, and accelerate the adoption of modern platform capabilities that improve developer experience and operational excellence. While the role may provide technical guidance and mentorship to a small team of engineers, success is measured through technical leadership, architectural influence, and the ability to drive alignment across globally distributed engineering teams. Your impact will extend from technical architecture and platform strategy through engineering governance, platform reliability, and long-term modernization efforts that support BlackRock's most critical technology platforms.

Your Responsibilities

In every role at BlackRock, you'll be expected to apply sound judgement and critical thinking to solve complex problems, adapt as the business evolves, and combine the curiosity to explore new approaches and technologies with the rigor to challenge the results. The scope of this role also includes the following responsibilities:

Define and drive the long-term vision, architecture, and technical roadmap for Compute Platform services supporting the Aladdin engineering ecosystem.

Lead the evolution of BlackRock's cloud-native compute strategy, ensuring platform capabilities meet the scalability, resiliency, security, and performance requirements of mission-critical technology workloads.

Establish engineering standards and reference architectures for containerization, workload orchestration, platform automation, and developer self-service capabilities.

Drive the adoption and maturity of platform engineering practices that improve developer productivity, accelerate software delivery, and enable consistent operational excellence across engineering teams.

Partner with engineering organizations across Aladdin to modernize application deployment patterns and accelerate adoption of cloud-native operating models.

Own strategic direction for compute platform capabilities including workload scheduling, container lifecycle management, observability, platform reliability, and service resiliency.

Lead automation and platform modernization initiatives that reduce operational complexity, increase platform consistency, and improve engineering efficiency.

Provide technical leadership, coaching, and mentorship to engineers and technical leads while influencing engineering practices, architectural standards, and platform strategy across globally distributed teams.

Serve as a trusted technical advisor to engineering leadership, influencing platform strategy, technology investment decisions, and long-term modernization priorities.

Champion engineering excellence by promoting operational ownership, architectural rigor, continuous improvement, and measurable platform outcomes.

Your Experience

Significant experience in software engineering, systems engineering, platform engineering, or related disciplines supporting large-scale distributed systems.

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Proven experience defining technical strategy and leading architecture initiatives for large-scale compute or platform engineering organizations.

Strong programming skills in Python, Go, Java, or similar languages.

Experience designing, building, and operating cloud-native platforms across public and hybrid cloud environments.

Deep expertise with enterprise-grade container orchestration platforms, containerized workloads, and modern application deployment patterns.

Strong understanding of container ecosystem concepts including workload scheduling, networking, storage integration, platform security, CNI, and CSI.

Experience with cloud deployment technologies, Infrastructure as Code platforms, declarative infrastructure lifecycle management, and platform automation technologies.

Experience building platform engineering capabilities that improve developer productivity, self-service adoption, operational consistency, and platform reliability.

Strong understanding of observability, monitoring, performance analysis, reliability engineering, and operational excellence practices.

Experience with modern telemetry instrumentation, monitoring, and observability platforms.

Demonstrated leadership experience mentoring engineers, driving organizational change, defining technical standards, and influencing senior stakeholders.

Demonstrated ability to influence and lead globally distributed engineering organizations through technical expertise, architectural leadership, stakeholder alignment, and execution of complex cross-functional initiatives.

Familiarity with Agile software development methodologies, architecture governance practices, and technical decision-making frameworks.

Strong communication skills with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts to both engineering and executive audiences.

Optional Recommendations

Role positioning

The current draft is well aligned to a Principal Engineer IC role. It clearly emphasizes technical leadership, architecture, platform strategy, and organizational influence rather than people management, which should help attract principal-level candidates.

Inclusive language

Consider replacing "Significant experience" with "Demonstrated success" in a few areas if you want to further emphasize outcomes over tenure. This can broaden the pool of qualified candidates while maintaining expectations.

Content validation

Please confirm that the team size, global footprint, and scope of the System Operations Platform organization remain accurate before posting, particularly if portions of the original draft were reused from a prior requisition.

Technology terminology

The final draft intentionally avoids over-indexing on specific technologies while preserving important compute-platform signals such as cloud-native platforms, containerization, platform engineering, CNI, and CSI. This should help attract experienced practitioners without making the posting overly tool-centric.