Principal Platform Engineer

Job Description

Insight Global is seeking a Principal Platform Engineer for a global retailer to take technical ownership of and scale an enterprise AI platform within GCP.

This is a senior individual contributor role with no direct reports, though this person will provide technical leadership and mentorship to engineering teams. The ideal candidate has personally built and operated enterprise AI/ML platforms in production, specifically within GCP and Vertex AI, and can own critical platform architecture decisions.

Responsibilities:

• Own and evolve the enterprise AI platform architecture within GCP
• Build and scale Vertex AI MLOps capabilities, including training pipelines, Model Registry, evaluation/approval workflows, and model serving
• Establish MLOps/LLMOps standards across development, deployment, monitoring, and lifecycle management
• Build GenAI platform capabilities including RAG, grounding, prompt management, guardrails, evaluations, agents, and MCP integration
• Develop reusable Terraform modules, Infrastructure-as-Code, policy-as-code, and CI/CD pipelines
• Create self-service “golden path” templates for engineering teams
• Implement AI/ML observability and FinOps practices, including tracing, drift detection, latency, token usage, and cost monitoring
• Establish platform standards around security, governance, scalability, and responsible AI
• Remain hands-on with Python while owning key architecture decisions
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship across engineering, data, architecture, security, and product teams

Required Skills & Experience

• 10+ years of experience across platform engineering, cloud infrastructure, software engineering, or enterprise architecture
• Proven experience building and operating enterprise AI/ML platforms in production
• Deep hands-on expertise with GCP and Vertex AI
• Strong experience with MLOps and LLMOps architecture
• Vertex AI experience across training pipelines, Model Registry, evaluation/approval, and model serving
• GenAI experience with RAG, grounding, guardrails, evaluations, agents, and/or MCP
• Strong Terraform, Infrastructure-as-Code, policy-as-code, and CI/CD experience
• Experience building reusable/self-service platform capabilities for other engineering teams
• Experience with AI/ML observability and FinOps
• Advanced Python software engineering skills
• Ability to independently own major platform architecture decisions

Pay Transparency:

Expected salary starting at $200,000

Vacancy Disclosure:

This role is for a new vacant opening within a growth project.

Please note, artificial intelligence tools are used to assist in screening and assessing applicants for this position.