Principal Staff Engineer – Web Platform

PlanetArt

Principal Staff Engineer for PlanetArt's ecommerce platform, overseeing development and operational excellence. Collaborating with global teams and optimizing high-traffic web systems for scalability.

Posted 5/28/2026full-timeCalabasas • California • 🇺🇸 United StatesLead💰 $130,000 - $195,000 per yearWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

ApacheAWSCloudDistributed SystemsEC2LAMPLinuxMySQLPHP

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Full-Stack Platform Engineering: Design, develop, and maintain scalable features and services across our LAMP-based ecommerce platform, with a strong focus on reliability, performance, maintainability, and operational excellence.
Production Operations & Incident Response: Act as a senior technical escalation point for complex production incidents, troubleshooting issues across application, infrastructure, networking, database, CDN, and deployment layers. Lead root cause analysis and drive long-term stability improvements.
AWS Infrastructure Ownership: Manage and optimize AWS infrastructure, including deployment architecture, scaling strategies, observability, security, disaster recovery, and cost efficiency. Partner closely with DevOps and engineering leadership on operational best practices.
High-Scale Performance Optimization: Monitor and improve application, database, and infrastructure performance for high-traffic consumer web applications. Identify bottlenecks and implement scalable solutions to improve uptime, latency, and system resilience.
Cross-Functional Technical Leadership: Partner with Product, Design, Operations, and Customer Experience teams to translate business requirements into scalable technical solutions and ensure successful project execution.
Global Engineering Collaboration: Work closely with the China-based engineering team to coordinate development efforts, conduct code reviews, align on architectural direction, manage releases, and maintain strong engineering communication across time zones.
Code Quality & Engineering Standards: Champion high engineering standards through code reviews, testing strategies, documentation, observability, and operational best practices. Drive continuous improvement in system reliability and development processes.
Technical Mentorship & Leadership: Provide technical mentorship and architectural guidance across the engineering organization. Influence technical direction through hands-on leadership, strong execution, and collaborative problem-solving.

Requirements

What you’ll need

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.
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

Comp & perks

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

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

Full-Stack EngineeringLAMP stackAWSEC2RDSS3LambdaCloudWatchDatabase Performance TuningDistributed Systems

Soft Skills

Technical MentorshipCross-Functional CollaborationProblem-SolvingCommunicationLeadershipOperational ExcellenceSelf-DirectedJudgmentCoordinationCollaboration