**Company Description**
We are SGS - the world's leading testing, inspection and certification company. Today, that mission is driven by data and technology. With 99,500 employees across 2,500 locations, we have a unique opportunity to build world-class digital products. We are now launching a new Hub in Madrid to do just that. This is your opportunity to build the foundational platform that will power our entire engineering organization.
We are building a new, product-focused engineering culture from the ground up, and we need a pioneer to build our racetrack. Your mission is to create a frictionless, automated platform that enables our teams to ship code multiple times a day with the executive backing and autonomy to make it happen.
As a Principal Platform Engineer, you are the master craftsman of our engineering environment. Your dual mission is to: 1) Build and run a lean, secure, and highly automated cloud platform (the "paved road") that makes it effortless for all engineers to build and ship. 2) Act as a lead, hands-on architect for our team's own flagship products, ensuring they are scalable, resilient, and built with practical, reusable patterns.
**What You'll Build and Own**
- ** Build the Paved Road**: Engineer core infrastructure from the ground up using Infrastructure as Code (Terraform), Kubernetes, and a fully automated CI/CD pipeline. Your goal is to make the right way the easy way.
- ** Lead by Building**: Act as the lead full-stack or backend engineer on our most critical projects, architecting through code and demonstrating best practices as you help deliver our first generation of data and AI products.
- ** Champion Reusability & Velocity**: Identify, generalize, and build high-quality, reusable components and architectural patterns that emerge from our work and the work of other teams.
- ** Automate for Speed & Safety**: Implement a practical DevSecOps culture by embedding automated security, testing, and observability directly into the development workflow.
- ** Be a Force Multiplier**: Act as a key technical mentor and partner to other engineering teams, helping them leverage the platform and adopt best practices to increase their own velocity.
**Qualifications**
- ** Cloud & IaC**: Expert-level, hands-on proficiency with a major cloud provider (GCP, AWS) and Terraform. You don't just use it; you architect with it.
- ** CI/CD & Automation**: Extensive experience building high-velocity CI/CD pipelines from scratch (e.g., GitHub Actions, GitLab CI) with a focus on speed and developer feedback.
- ** Observability**: A practical, hands-on approach to building an observability stack (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger) that provides actionable insights, not just dashboards.
**Who You Are**
- You have extensive (e.g., 8+ years) experience and identify as a builder first, with a background in SRE, Platform Engineering, or senior Software Engineering.
- You are a pragmatist who hates bureaucracy and believes the best architecture is the simplest one that works.
- You measure your success by the velocity and autonomy of the engineers you support.
- You love getting your hands dirty and leading from the front.
**Additional Information** What We Offer**
- **
Top-of-Market Compensation**: A highly competitive salary and bonus package for Madrid, designed to attract and retain premier talent for this strategic role.
- ** A Clear Growth Path**: This role offers a direct path to technical leadership and the opportunity to build and mentor a team around your architectural vision.
- ** A Compelling Mission**: Build the platform that will run the AI and Data products that have a real-world impact on global safety, sustainability, and supply chains.
- ** Foundational Impact**: You will be the first Principal Platform Engineer in our new Digital Hub, setting the standards for how a general leader builds and ships software.
- ** Greenfield Ownership & Autonomy**: This is not about maintaining legacy systems. You have a mandate to build our entire cloud-native platform from scratch, backed by C-level sponsorship.