Principal Engineer - Platform (m/f/d)

Principal Engineer - Platform (m/f/d)

InPost has revolutionised e-commerce parcel delivery in Poland and is now one of Europe's leading OOH e-commerce enablement platforms. Founded in 1999 by Rafał Brzoska, InPost provides delivery services through our network of almost 60,000 Automated Parcel Machines (APMs) and almost 35,000 pick-up drop-off points (PUDO) in nine countries across Europe, as well as to-door courier and fulfilment services to e-commerce merchants. InPost's lockers provide consumers with a cheaper and more flexible, convenient, environmentally friendly and contactless delivery option.

The Platform Principal Engineer is the senior-most individual contributor in the Platform Engineering Domain. You set the technical direction for how ~80 engineers build, operate, and evolve InPost's engineering platform — spanning cloud infrastructure, developer experience, reliability, and AI foundations. You operate at the intersection of architecture and delivery: you shape the strategy and you stay close enough to the work to validate it.

This is not a consulting role. You drive technical decisions that stick.

What You'll Do

Technical Direction

• Own the long-term technical roadmap for the Platform Engineering Domain across four pillars: Platform Engineering & Delivery, Developer Experience, SRE & Reliability, AI & Cloud Foundations.
• Identify architectural risks and opportunities ahead of the teams — raise them early, propose solutions, drive resolution.
• Define and evolve platform-wide standards: SDLC compliance (targeting SCS ≥ 80/100), observability baselines, cloud-native patterns.

Cloud & Infrastructure

• Lead the technical strategy for InPost's migration from on-prem data centres to GCP — targeting a 25–50% CO2e footprint shift from the Jan 2026 baseline by year-end.
• Establish reference architectures for services running on GCP; review and govern deviations.
• Drive cost efficiency, reliability, and security posture at the platform layer.

Developer Experience

• Define the developer platform vision: what self-service capabilities engineering teams get, how they get them, and what the experience benchmark is.
• Partner with the Developer Experience and Platform Engineering leads to move from bespoke tooling to a coherent internal developer platform.

AI Foundations

• Shape the technical approach to AI adoption across InPost Technology (AES target: ≥ 75/100 by Dec 2026).
• Design the infrastructure and platform primitives that make AI tooling safe, scalable, and measurable — not experimental.
• Act as a technical bridge between the AI & Cloud Foundations team and the broader engineering org.

Cross-Domain Technical Leadership

• Represent Platform Engineering in architecture reviews, CTO-level discussions, and cross-domain technical governance.
• Mentor senior and staff engineers; raise the technical floor across the domain.
• Write well: your proposals, design documents, and postmortems set the quality standard.

What You Won't Find Here

• A governance-heavy role where influence is measured in slide decks.
• A team that treats reliability as an afterthought.
• A company that treats AI adoption as a comms exercise.

What We're Looking For

Must have

• 10+ years of software or infrastructure engineering, with 3+ years in a principal or staff-level IC role at a company of comparable scale.
• Deep GCP expertise — architecture, IAM, Kubernetes (GKE), networking, cost management.
• Strong SRE foundations: SLOs, error budgets, incident management, reliability by design.
• Demonstrated track record of driving multi-team technical initiatives from ambiguity to delivery.
• Ability to operate at both the whiteboard and the pull request — you read code, you write RFCs, you review production incidents.
• Clear, direct communication in English (Polish is an advantage, not a requirement).

Strong plus

• Experience building internal developer platforms (Backstage, platform APIs, golden paths).
• Hands-on background in CI/CD systems, GitLab, or supply-chain security.
• Exposure to AI/ML infrastructure or LLM-based tooling at production scale.
• Experience in logistics, e-commerce, or high-throughput operational systems.

Why Join InPost?

• Opportunity to work in a diverse, international and cross-functional environment, along with leading experts.
• Fulfilling careers with a range of benefits for employees and invests in providing training opportunities for their development.
• Your impact will be visible instantly and you will be making a difference in our users lives
• Real ownership — you'll make architectural calls that impact multiple markets A platform with genuine complexity worth solving (international scale, complex CMS) Space to experiment with AI tooling and bring new ideas into production A mature, experienced team that values technical depth