Principal Engineer, Platform

Principal Hybrid Helsinki, Finland Full-time Posted 3 months ago

Skills & stack

Skills

BigQuery ClickHouse Distributed Systems Snowflake

About the role

Smartly.io is hiring a Principal Engineer, Platform, in Helsinki, Finland. You will guide technical strategy for foundational systems across its advertising platform, with a focus on scalability, reliability and developer productivity.

Work format

This is a full-time position with a hybrid work arrangement.

Skills and tools

Distributed Systems
ClickHouse
BigQuery
Snowflake

What to prepare

Prepare a walkthrough of a cross-team initiative, covering architectural decisions and measurable improvements.
Choose a database example explaining your replication, sharding and reliability trade-offs.

Responsibilities

Shape platform architecture and technical investment priorities with engineering teams, product leaders and the Chief Architect.
Lead cross-team platform initiatives through architecture, design and implementation.
Define safeguards for AI agents interacting with platform capabilities, data and internal systems.
Help teams combine large-scale datasets into a unified data foundation.
Evolve database architecture, including sharding, replication and scaling strategies.
Contribute to design reviews, prototypes and incident analysis; address reliability, observability and performance bottlenecks.
Mentor engineers, share technical knowledge and participate in recruitment.

Requirements

3+ years at Staff, Principal, Lead Engineer or equivalent level, driving technical strategy across teams.
Experience leading multi-quarter initiatives spanning 3+ engineering teams, with measurable technical or operational improvements.
5+ years operating production systems where relational database architecture, scalability, reliability and performance were critical.
Distributed systems expertise covering consistency, availability, partition tolerance, replication and sharding.
Experience with analytical databases, including ClickHouse, BigQuery and Snowflake.
Ability to influence technical direction without managerial authority and communicate complex topics to varied stakeholders.
High standards for code, testing and user experience, with openness to ideas from others.

Nice to have

Infrastructure and cloud platform knowledge would be an advantage.
Experience designing systems that expose capabilities, data and workflows to AI agents is a plus.
Experience leading reliability, observability or performance engineering initiatives is welcome.

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Smartly.io

Product

Smartly.io is a Helsinki-founded advertising automation platform used by brands to manage creative production, campaign management and media optimization across major ad channels.

Location: Helsinki, Finland
Team size: 501-1000
Remote policy: Hybrid

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