Description
Principal Platform Engineer (Java, Architecture & Enablement)
Team: Platform
Location: Geneva
Commitment: Employee / Full-Time
Workplace Type: onsite
Who is Sonar?
Sonar helps prevent code quality and code security issues from reaching production, amplifies developers' productivity in concert with AI assistants, and improves the developer experience with streamlined workflows. Sonar analyzes all code, regardless of who writes it — your internal team, genAI, or third parties — resulting in more secure, reliable, and maintainable applications. Rooted in the open source community, Sonar’s solutions support over 30 programming languages, frameworks, and infrastructure technologies. Today, Sonar is used by +7M developers and 400K organizations worldwide, including the DoD, Microsoft, NASA, MasterCard, Siemens, and T-Mobile.
We believe in developing great products that are supported by great internal teams and a strong culture. We are highly committed to and obsessed with the company, users, each other, and our open source community. We have high standards and hold each other accountable for acting with positivity, dedication, thoughtfulness, empathy, and passion daily.
We are deliberate with our decisions with high clarity of intention. At the same time, we feel extreme urgency and move forward quickly.
And lastly, we are highly effective and operationally efficient. We operate collectively as One Team to accomplish our goals.
At Sonar, CODE is more than just an acronym – it's a mindset that defines daily operations.
Why You Should Apply:
At Sonar, we’re a group of brilliant, motivated, and driven professionals working hard to help supercharge developers to build better, faster. Sonar helps to continuously improve code quality and code security while reducing developer toil. This means that developers can focus on doing more of what they love and less of what they don’t. Our solutions don’t just solve symptoms of problems – we help fix issues at the source – for all code, whether it's developer-written, AI-generated, or from third parties.
We have a dynamic culture with employees worldwide and hub offices in the USA, Switzerland, the UK, Singapore, and Germany. Team members should be able to come to work every day, work on a product they are proud of, love what they do, and feel energized by their peers. With our roots deep in the open source community, we’re all about the mission: supercharge developers to build better, faster.
The Impact You Will Have:
As a Principal Platform Engineer (Architecture & Enablement), you will be the technical catalyst behind our "Golden Path" strategy, turning architectural vision into tangible engineering reality. You will sit at the intersection of our Platform Division and our Product Software Engineers, providing them with the autonomy to ship faster and safer. You will design and build the "Golden Path" engine—the core scaffolding, CLI tools, and internal portal integrations—that allows engineering teams to bootstrap production-ready services in minutes, not days. You will engineer the foundational software blocks and libraries that solve common backend challenges once, enabling product teams to focus on business logic rather than reinventing infrastructure plumbing. You will act as a force multiplier, actively identifying friction points in our entire development lifecycle (from IDE to Production) and building the integration "glue" that eliminates them. You will serve as the R&D arm for the platform, prototyping emerging technologies (e.g., coding agents, ephemeral environments) to validate their value before scaling them across the organization.
What You Will Do Daily:
- Build the "Glue": You won't just design on whiteboards; you will write the high-leverage code—whether it’s a custom Backstage plugin, a specific GitHub Action, or a CLI in Go/Python—that bridges the gap between our raw infrastructure and the developer experience.
- Experiment & Prototype: You will create "Tracer Bullet" implementations for new architectural standards, proving they work in code before advocating for their adoption across the fleet.
- Engage as an Embedded Expert: You will partner directly with Product Squads, not as an auditor, but as a co-pilot—helping them adopt the Golden Paths and gathering direct feedback to iterate on the platform product.
- Mentorship & Technical Leadership: You will elevate the technical bar of the Platform Engineering division, mentoring other engineers on modern software design, automation strategies, and "Platform as a Product" thinking.
The Experience You Will Need:
- Principal-Level "Builder" Mindset: You have 10+ years of software engineering experience and still love to code. You are comfortable jumping into a complex Java/Python codebase to refactor a core component or writing a new tool in Go/TypeScript from scratch.
- Cloud Native Architecture Mastery: You possess deep technical expertise in modern infrastructure standards— Networking, Containers and Kubernetes. You understand how to design distributed systems that fully exploit these platforms (e.g., resilience patterns, sidecars, ephemeral scaling) rather than just "lifting and shifting" legacy applications.
- Forward-Looking Innovation (AI & Agents): You have a pulse on the future of software engineering. You are actively exploring how GenAI, LLM Agents, and intelligent automation can revolutionize the developer experience, and you have the curiosity to build the experimental tools that prove it.
- Platform Product Engineering: You treat internal infrastructure as a product, but you understand that the best interface is no interface. You have moved beyond building static Service Catalogs (like Backstage) and have experience building CLI-first platforms and IDE-integrated workflows that scale "Golden Paths" to hundreds of users without forcing them to switch contexts.
- Influence without Authority & Internal Evangelism (DevRel): You combine the empathy of a Developer Advocate with the strategic weight of a Principal Engineer. You drive adoption not by mandate, but by winning hearts and minds—marketing the platform’s value, building internal communities, and acting as the "Sales Engineer" for the Golden Path
We Value Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion:
At Sonar, we believe that our diversity is our strength. We are a global company that values and respects different backgrounds, perspectives, and cultures.
We are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive work environment where everyone feels valued and empowered to contribute their best. We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer and welcome all qualified applicants, regardless of race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.
All offers of employment at Sonar are contingent upon the precise results of a comprehensive background check and reference verification conducted before the start date.
We do not currently support visa candidates in the US.
Applications that are submitted through agencies or third party recruiters will not be considered.
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