Principal Staff Engineer - Web Platform
Calabasas, United States Remote
$130,000–$195,000 a yearJobFig found this opening at its original source and checks that it remains available.
About the role
PlanetArt is seeking a Principal Staff Engineer-Web Platform to serve as a senior technical leader within our engineering organization and a key partner to the VP of Engineering. This is a highly hands-on role focused on building, operating, and scaling high-traffic ecommerce web platforms in a fast-moving production environment. This role requires strong operational judgment and the ability to independently own production challenges across application, database, infrastructure, and deployment layers. The engineer will collaborate closely with our China-based development organization, serving as a senior US-based technical lead responsible for cross-team coordination, code quality, architectural guidance, and production stability. This is an ideal opportunity for an experienced engineer who thrives in high-scale ecommerce environments and enjoys combining deep application engineering with modern cloud operations and production ownership.
What you'll bring
- Senior-Level Full-Stack Engineering Experience: 7+ years of professional experience building and operating large-scale web applications, including substantial hands-on experience with the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP).
- Strong AWS & Cloud Operations Expertise: Deep hands-on experience with AWS services and production cloud environments, including EC2, RDS, S3, Lambda, CloudWatch, networking, scaling, monitoring, and infrastructure troubleshooting.
- Ecommerce & High-Traffic Website Experience: Experience supporting high-volume consumer-facing websites or ecommerce platforms, with a strong understanding of scalability, uptime, performance optimization, and operational reliability.
- Production Troubleshooting Expertise: Demonstrated ability to diagnose and resolve complex production issues under pressure, including database replication issues, performance degradation, infrastructure failures, deployment issues, and site outages.
- Distributed Systems & Database Knowledge: Strong understanding of distributed web architectures, database performance tuning, replication strategies, caching, queuing systems, and fault-tolerant system design.
- Global Team Collaboration: Experience working effectively with offshore or globally distributed engineering teams, with strong communication, coordination, and cross-cultural collaboration skills.
- Engineering Best Practices: Strong understanding of software engineering fundamentals including Git workflows, CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, observability, code review practices, and secure development standards.
- Ownership Mentality: Self-directed engineer with strong operational instincts, excellent judgment, and the ability to independently own critical technical initiatives from design through production support.
- Technical Leadership: Demonstrated ability to influence engineering direction, mentor developers, and drive technical excellence through hands-on leadership rather than direct people management.
- Chinese Language Skills: Ability to communicate in Mandarin (spoken or written) is highly desirable to facilitate collaboration with our China-based engineering team.