Principal Platform Engineer

The Role

This is a 0→1 build. You'll own the architecture, build and rollout of Neko's internal AI developer platform, shaping how our engineers design, ship and operate software through agentic, AI-assisted workflows.

It's a hands-on technical leadership role. You'll be the person setting long-term direction for AI agents, tooling and the systems underneath them, while also doing the work. The expectation is that what you build gets used across teams and meaningfully changes how engineering happens here.

What You'll Deliver

In the first 6 months

• A clear architectural direction for the platform
• Initial components shipped and adopted by early teams
• Measurable improvements to developer speed, reliability and autonomy
• Genuine organic adoption across engineering, driven by value not mandate

By month 12

• A substantive shift toward agentic, engineer-led development workflows
• Platform scaled beyond pilot groups to multiple teams
• Clear ownership models for agents, tooling and supporting systems
• Long-term architecture defined and moving toward maturity

What We're Looking For

Must-haves

• Proven experience building and shipping an internal developer platform, hands-on, not advisory
• A strong track record leading agentic or AI-assisted development work that engineers actually use day-to-day
• Real backend engineering depth with production systems, recent Java or C# strongly preferred
• Experience rolling out platform tooling to 20-30+ developers with meaningful adoption
• Expertise with workflow engines such as AWS Step Functions, Azure Durable Functions, Temporal, Conductor or Dagster
• The ability to drive change through influence and credibility, not positional authority
• 10-15+ years of engineering experience with substantial platform ownership

Nice to have

• Full-stack exposure, though backend depth is the priority
• Background in product-led SaaS or organisations with strong internal developer tooling culture