Principal Engineer – Cloud and Datacenter Software

Principal Engineer – Cloud and Datacenter Software

Intel – Hillsboro, Oregon, USA

We are seeking a highly capable Principal Engineer to help shape the future of datacenter and cloud software. In this pivotal role, you will engage deeply with customer technologists, define optimization opportunities across the software stack, and influence technical direction across both Intel and the broader industry. You will architect innovative solutions, optimize workloads, and drive technical excellence that accelerates customer success and Intel platform leadership.

• Engage directly with major customers to understand their use cases, application architectures, and performance‑critical needs, translating these into actionable architecture and optimization strategies.
• Influence and define technical direction across Intel and the industry as a recognized domain expert, acting as a change agent and role model for Intel values.
• Lead the architecture and optimization of customer workloads across cloud, on‑premise, and hyperscale environments, leveraging Intel platform software, industry software, compilers, tools, libraries, and frameworks.
• Mentor and develop junior technical leaders, grow the technical community, and align organizational goals with a cohesive technical vision.
• Identify and define opportunities for future architecture optimizations, including NUMA, cache awareness, branch prediction, and other advancements tailored for next‑generation Intel platforms.
• Help drive Intel’s participation and leadership in open‑source communities (e.g., Spark, Postgres, MySQL, Go, zstd) and identify areas where deeper engagement will strengthen the ecosystem.

Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or equivalent industry experience.
• 10+ years of experience developing or architecting workloads or software frameworks, with 5+ in cloud and data center.
• 3+ years of direct customer‑facing experience.
• Demonstrated expertise in workload optimization, profiling tools, and cloud software architecture.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Master’s degree or PhD in a relevant technical field.
• Experience communicating with customers, technical teams, and management to gather requirements, analyze workloads, design experiments, and propose optimizations.
• Documented contributions to the cloud technology industry (e.g., whitepapers, conference presentations, patents, code contributions, technical blogs).
• Familiarity with performance tooling, compiler technologies, software libraries, and workload profiling methodologies.
• Expertise in one or more cloud workload categories such as data services, web, AI, storage or media workloads.
• Ability to optimize workloads for future Intel architectures.

The Software Team drives customer value by enabling differentiated experiences through leadership AI technologies and foundational software stacks, products, and services. The group is responsible for developing the holistic strategy for client and data center software in collaboration with OSVs, ISVs, developers, partners and OEMs. The group delivers specialized NPU IP to enable the AI PC and GPU IP to support all of Intel’s market segments.

The group also has HW and SW engineering experts responsible for delivering IP, SOCs, runtimes, and platforms to support the CPU and GPU/accelerator roadmap, inclusive of integrated and discrete graphics.

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, religious creed, sex, national origin, ancestry, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, military and veteran status, marital status, pregnancy, gender, gender expression, gender identity, sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by local law, regulation, or ordinance.

Applicants must consent to and pass an extended Background Investigation, which includes (subject to country law), extended education, SEC sanctions, and additional criminal and civil checks.

We offer a total compensation package that ranks among the best in…