Principal Product Platform Engineer

Remote in New Zealand, The Smartly Platforms and Architecture Team are looking for a Principal Product Platform Engineer to own end-to-end technology outcomes and architecture. How might we create structural leverage across the business through technology and automation? How might we create structural advantages in cost-to-serve? How might we help the engineers we work with be the best versions of themselves at work through training, mentoring and sponsorship?

Our Why

The next twelve months at Smartly are rare. We're profitable. We have 20,000+ companies and 200,000+ payees on the platform. We've just been given the runway to modernise the technical spine of the product. A deliberate evolution of a hybrid monolith that already works.

This Principal role creates the most architectural leverage in the company. It's vital that we have a kind, thoughtful, technically deep individual contributor in the role who can lift up the business around them.

About the Role (your why)

You are the senior technical authority in a major platform domain. Probably core platform design + shared frameworks, and, we'll shape that to your strengths.

You co-author the platform strategy with me. You make the architectural decisions other teams depend on. Collaborating with the team, you design and operate the shared services, identity foundations, developer tooling, and reliability standards that compound across every product team. You drive simplification. The platform should get smaller, clearer and more automated over time.

What you'll do

No two weeks are the same, but here's the rough shape.

Design reviews — running them, and being the second pair of eyes in reviews across the org. 1:1s with the engineers you mentor, and with me. Pairing with engineers in product squads on the harder technical problems.

Building! You will build a lot. On Monday that might be automating our release process, on Tuesday it might be automating our developer machine setup. Wednesday might see you getting into our monolith and beginning our clean architecture upgrades and perhaps on Thursday you'll work on ensuring that the agents and harnesses we use deeply understand the codebase and data model, so that those agents are less dependent on human intervention. Friday is for learning.

Writing — architecture decisions, design docs, agentic prompts that the whole team will use. Time with the team on the shared AI tooling that makes the whole engineering org faster. We write things down. Decisions, designs, tradeoffs, and post-incident learnings live on the page. It's how we think, how we align, and how we work async. It is vital that you believe in writing as we do. Writing is not a chore to be done at the end of your work in this team. Writing is a forcing function for thinking and for clarity. You will only succeed here if you love writing as we do.

Focus time is non-negotiable. We protect the calendar for deep work. Meetings have a purpose or they don't happen. We tend to focus in the morning and meet in the afternoons. Async standups by default, 3 o'clock Smoko twice a week where work talk is banned and we connect as humans.

What working with us is like

I'm a hands-on manager and I believe that all managers should be hands on. It builds empathy in the same way that senior leaders who show up on incident response calls build empathy. I'm building a team that believes where feedback is concerned, kindness and empathy lead while directness and problem solving follow. We avoid ruinous empathy here.

I believe strongly in learning and curiosity, and I'll work with you to invest deeply in your growth, and in your ability to grow others around you. Mostly this will look like training and mentoring, but as your mana grows you'll sponsor promising staff yourself, in the same way I'll be sponsoring you.

Our team are full of thoughtful people who want to help others. We believe in respecting focus time and acting with remote-first intentionality. We believe in strategic laziness - why would I keep doing this manual stuff when a machine can do it for me? The team are pragmatic and want to make choices that favour technical purity, AND we acknowledge that sometimes that's not the right thing for the business and for our colleagues. When you join this team, your standards will become team standards. Your judgement, vision, taste, agency and ownership will make everyone around you faster.

What you'll bring

You've been a Principal, or senior-most-engineer-on-the-team for a while, or perhaps you're a solution architect who has been coding and are looking to get back into more demanding engineering on the hot path. You've made architectural calls at scale and you've lived with the consequences long enough to have opinions about what you'd do differently next time.

You're deeply comfortable in a demanding application engineering space. You can help us move to domain driven design. You're very familiar with C# and dotnet. You probably know enough python and typescript to be dangerous, but if there's any language or framework that we decide we need, you'll quickly become the company expert and help others in their learning. Our monolith works, and it's chocka block with decisions that made sense at the time - you need to be comfortable with taking those decisions, applying taste and judgement, and engineering modern solutions. We're looking at moving to a modular monolith with a well formed internal structure. We're looking at pulling a ton of business logic out of stored procedures and into code. We're looking at our database and cloud technology and making choices around those. You need to not only thrive in that space, you also need to help others feel at home there.

You have judgement, taste, vision, and context. The four things AI can't replace. You can look at AI-generated output and tell the difference between excellent work and work that merely appears excellent. You know what good looks like on sight. You see how the pieces fit. You know which best practices don't apply here.

If this is you

I'd love to hear from you. Please apply.

If parts of this resonate but you're worried you don't tick every box — please apply anyway. The traits I'm looking for — judgement, taste, vision, context, agency, ownership — don't come from a particular degree, background, or career path. Smartly is committed to building a team that reflects Aotearoa New Zealand, and I'd particularly like to hear from women, Māori, Pasifika, takatāpui, disabled and neurodivergent engineers, and anyone who took a non-linear path into the work. If you need any adjustments to be at your best in the conversation or beyond, tell me.

When you write, tell me about a system you co-authored that other teams couldn't stop using, a complexity you talked the room out of building, or a Principal-level call you got right when it would have been easier to get wrong.