Principal Engineer

Remote/Hybrid

ABOUT THE ROLE

We’re seeking a seasoned technical leader with deep expertise in building and scaling complex, cloud-native distributed systems. This individual is a recognized authority in architecture, with a proven track record of shaping organization-wide technical standards, driving security and reliability strategies, and influencing senior stakeholders. You’ll bring strong experience in high-throughput data systems, event-driven architectures, and modern orchestration frameworks, along with the ability to align technical vision to broader business strategy.

Beyond technical excellence, you’re a strategic thinker and mentor who elevates teams, champions best practices—including emerging AI‑assisted development—and thrives in high‑impact, highly collaborative environments.

Relativity is a leading legal data intelligence company building technology that helps users organize data, discover the truth, and act on it with confidence. Our AI‑powered, cloud platform, Relativity One, transforms massive volumes of complex information into actionable insights for litigation, investigations, regulatory inquiries, data breach responses, and other high‑stakes legal work where accuracy and trust are crucial.

The world’s largest law firms, corporations and government agencies rely on Relativity’s legal AI software to securely surface and manage the most relevant and impactful information in their matters. Beyond our commercial impact, we’re deeply committed to expanding access to technology for academic institutions through Relativity Academic and supporting pro bono legal work through Justice for Change.

At Relativity, engineers don’t just write code—they harness AI tools to architect, optimize, and deliver scalable software faster and shape the future of legal technology. They shape how industries uncover critical insights, ensure compliance, advance access to justice and continuously evolve our platform using the latest technologies, including cloud-native architectures, AI capabilities, and modern developer tooling. Our AI powers privacy programs, identifies confidential information, and detects language indicating misconduct.

We’re reimagining how legal professionals uncover truth at scale, and engineering is at the heart of that transformation.

• Drive the design and architecture of distributed, scalable, secure full‑stack cloud services that process petabytes of data weekly. Influence execution across engineering.
• Resolve the most complex, cross‑organizational technical problems through deep technical expertise, collaboration, and hands‑on implementation.
• Define and lead the organization‑wide technical vision and architecture and shape long‑term platform and data strategy.
• Establish enterprise standards for system scalability, reliability, maintainability, security, testability, and flexibility, partnering with teams to drive adoption.
• Influence and align engineering execution with company‑level strategy and shape engineering culture across the organization.
• Influence executive‑level product and platform decisions.
• Lead the evolution of Enrichment from primarily batch‑oriented pipelines toward streaming‑first, continuously processing workflows that deliver real‑time and large‑scale results (1K to 1B+ files) — and write the code that proves the patterns out.
• Stay deeply hands‑on. Principals at Relativity aren’t ivory‑tower architects — they design, implement, review, and operate production software. You’ll be in the codebase, in the metrics, and on call for the hardest problems, owning systems end to end.
• Drive our agentic engineering push within Enrichment. Establish best practices, guardrails, and tooling for AI‑assisted and agentic development, and raise the bar for how the domain designs, tests, and ships software in an AI‑driven world.

• 12+ years of experience designing, building and operating complex cloud‑native distributed systems.
• Recognized authority in architecture and distributed systems.
• Experience defining organization‑wide technical standards.
• Deep involvement in security,…