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 role requires strong operational judgment and the ability to independently own production challenges across application, database, infrastructure, and deployment layers. The ideal candidate is equally comfortable writing production code, diagnosing complex site reliability issues, managing cloud infrastructure, and leading technical problem-solving during high-severity incidents.
Requirements
- 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
- Chinese Language Skills: Ability to communicate in Mandarin (spoken or written) is highly desirable to facilitate collaboration with our China-based engineering team
- 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
Benefits
- Health, Dental, and Vision Insurance
- Life Insurance
- Pet Insurance
- Mental Health Insurance
- 401(k) with matching
- Comprehensive Time Off Program including Paid Time Off, Sick Days, Paid Holidays, and Floating Holidays
- Employee Product Discounts
