Principal Software Engineer - Agent & App Platform

About this role

WHO WE ARE

Atlan is building the context layer for enterprise AI. Enterprises are pouring money into AI and most of it dies in production because the AI does not understand the business context around the data. That is the problem Atlan solves.

Gartner has named context the defining issue in enterprise AI, and calls context graphs the essential infrastructure for AI agents, naming Atlan one of three vendors already building it. We are also the only vendor named a Leader across all four major Gartner and Forrester evaluations for data catalogs, data governance and metadata management, the foundation the context layer runs on.

Come build the infrastructure that AI runs on.

Atlan is evolving from a world of apps to a world where apps and AI agents work together. The Agent & App Platform team is building the foundational infrastructure that makes this possible.

We’re looking for a Principal Software Engineer to help set the technical direction for the agent registry and gateway platform.

THE TEAM

The Agent & App Platform team builds the foundations that allow Atlan teams, partners, and customers to build, run, distribute, observe, and govern apps and agents reliably at scale.

You’ll work across areas such as:

- Agent Registry & Gateways: Systems for registering, discovering, authenticating, governing, and routing agents, tools, and MCP servers.

- Agent Platform: Shared capabilities for agent execution, including identity, context, secure execution, sessions, checkpointing, and observability.

- App Runtime: Reliable execution infrastructure built on Kubernetes and Temporal.

- Distribution & Automation: Packaging, deployment, marketplace experiences, workflows, triggers, templates, and automation capabilities.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

You’ll own significant technical problems end-to-end and help build the platform primitives powering Atlan’s next generation of apps and agents.

Depending on your strengths and interests, you may:

- Design and build platform services for agents, tools, and MCP servers, including registries, gateways, authentication, authorization, routing, policy enforcement, audit logging, and tracing.

- Build the primitives that power agent execution and lifecycle — including templates, marketplace experiences, secure sandboxing, tenant-aware context, durable sessions, checkpointing, and observability.

- Evolve Atlan’s workflow and runtime infrastructure using Temporal, Kubernetes, and cloud-native technologies, while improving reliability, scalability, performance, and cost.

- Design and operate multi-tenant distributed systems for enterprise workloads at significant scale, solving complex problems around isolation, failure recovery, capacity, and noisy neighbours.

- Partner with Product and Engineering teams on how apps and agents come together across registration, distribution, and runtime, and contribute to architecture, RFCs, and technical standards.

- Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar through strong engineering practices, design reviews, and technical leadership.

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR

- 14+ years of experience in platform engineering, infrastructure, or backend systems, ideally in a SaaS environment.

- Strong experience building platform services, API gateways, service registries, control planes, or similar systems.

- Deep expertise in distributed systems and multi-tenant architectures, including event-driven systems, service communication, orchestration, retries, idempotency, and failure recovery.

- Strong Kubernetes, containerization, and cloud infrastructure experience across AWS and/or GCP.

- Experience designing systems with clear reliability, latency, capacity, and cost requirements, across both 0→1 and mature production environments.

- Ability to work autonomously on ambiguous, cross-functional technical problems and communicate complex trade-offs clearly.

IT’S A PLUS IF YOU HAVE

- Experience with MCP, A2A, agent frameworks, agent runtimes, LLM gateways, or agent observability.

- Experience building marketplaces, plugin ecosystems, extension platforms, developer platforms, or workflow/automation systems.

- Experience with identity and authorization for non-human actors, secure sandboxing, context propagation, or multi-tenant agent execution.

- Experience with Temporal, Terraform, Helm, GitOps, CI/CD, or container registries.

- Experience operating enterprise-scale production systems with demanding SLOs, observability, distributed tracing, or cost attribution.

HOW WE WORK

We’re building an AI-native engineering organization and use AI-assisted development tools such as Claude and Cursor as part of our everyday workflow.

You’ll thrive here if you take strong ownership, enjoy ambiguous technical problems, communicate clearly, learn quickly, and care about building reusable primitives, reliable systems, and great developer experiences.

THE TECHNOLOGY

Go · Python · AWS · GCP · Kubernetes · Karpenter · Temporal · MCP · Terraform · Helm · Prometheus · Grafana · GitOps

You don’t need experience with every technology listed above. We care more about strong engineering fundamentals, distributed-systems expertise, and the ability to learn quickly.

WHY ATLAN?

Joining Atlan means being part of a global movement to help data teams do their life’s best work. Here’s what you can expect:

- Competitive Compensation: We benchmark at the top of the market and keep compensation simple: strong base salary, performance‑based variable pay, and impact‑driven equity (for most roles), so your total rewards grow in step with the value you create over time.

- AI Native Culture: Atlan is where AI-native builders come to build the systems the future of work will run on. AI isn’t an add-on, it’s woven into how we build, think, and work every day, empowering every Atlanian to move faster and create a bigger impact.

- Health & Wellness: From Day‑1 health, dental, vision, and mental health to flexible health stipends,…