Principal Engineer - Test Platform Services

About SimpliSafe We’re a high-tech home security company that’s passionate about protecting the life you’ve built and our mission of keeping Every Home Secure. And we’ve created a culture here that cares just as deeply about the career you’re building. Ours is a no ego culture of collaboration and innovation where those seeking their next challenge can find big opportunities and make a huge impact on the lives of all those who we protect. We don’t just want you to work here. We want you to grow and thrive here. We’re embracing a hybrid work model that enables our teams to split their time between office and home. Hybrid for us means we expect our teams to come together in our state-of-the-art office on two core days, typically Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday – working together in person and choosing where they work for the remainder of the week. We all benefit from flexibility and get to use the best of both worlds to get our work done. Why are we hiring? Within our Tools and Automation organization, the Test Platform Services (TPS) team builds and operates the platforms and automation that validate SimpliSafe’s end-to-end ecosystem — spanning the full product stack: connected cameras and sensors, base stations, firmware, cloud services, monitoring workflows, and mobile applications. We enable scalable, production-like validation across hardware, firmware, and distributed software systems to ensure our devices behave correctly in real-world conditions and that critical customer journeys function reliably before reaching production. We are seeking a Software Engineer to lead TPS’s technical vision while leading a team of engineers. This role combines hands-on architectural ownership with people leadership, execution accountability, and technical mentorship. This is a highly collaborative position partnering closely with Infrastructure, Backend, Firmware, and Monitoring teams to ensure our validation platforms evolve alongside product and system complexity. It’s ideal for a leader who wants to remain deeply technical while shaping a high-impact engineering team responsible for validating complex, distributed systems at scale. What You’ll Do Establish and execute the long-term architectural vision for scalable validation platforms, including automation, performance, and resilience testing capabilities Partner cross-functionally with Infrastructure, Backend, Firmware, Monitoring, and Product teams to align validation systems with product architecture, roadmaps, and business goals Ensure virtual devices and simulation systems accurately reflect real-world hardware behavior, eliminating drift between physical and virtual environments Build and operate validation platforms that are reliable, observable, cost-efficient, and trusted, with clear metrics to monitor platform health and validation effectiveness Drive continuous performance, scalability, and resilience analysis, proactively identifying system bottlenecks and leveraging data-driven and AI-assisted approaches to improve validation and code quality. Grow and lead a high-performing TPS team, establishing engineering standards, embedding shift-left validation practices, and fostering a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement What You’ll Bring Required 8+ years of professional software engineering experience building and scaling distributed, cloud-native systems, with end-to-end ownership across the software lifecycle Deep expertise in scalability, reliability, observability, and production-grade system architecture Strong hands-on engineering capability and experience operating infrastructure in AWS (Kubernetes/EKS preferred) Experience building and operating internal platforms or shared engineering systems used across multiple teams Proven experience leading and developing engineers in a player/coach or technical leadership capacity Strongly Preferred Experience with device simulation, embedded systems, firmware-cloud integration, ... (truncated, view full listing at source)