Principal Software Engineer, Distributed Systems

Position Overview

We are looking for a highly autonomous senior architect to drive, review, and own the software architecture for our core platform. This person will be the technical conscience for large‑scale, distributed systems, and will collaborate closely with engineering leads, product owners, and infrastructure teams. You will design, evolve, and enforce architectural standards and patterns; lead cross‑cutting initiatives; and mentor other engineers.

At this level, we expect you to operate with minimal hand holding, influence technical decisions, resolve tradeoffs, and bring clarity to ambiguity. The position is remote‑friendly.

• Define, evolve, and own the architectural vision and roadmaps for the major platform domains (e.g. orchestration, job execution, data pipelines, sidecar services).
• Perform architecture reviews, assess proposals from teams, and vet designs for adherence to standards, scalability, performance, reliability, and security.
• Lead or contribute hands‑on to critical subsystems (e.g. orchestrator, scheduling, service mesh, job pipelines, stateful services).
• Drive and enforce cross‑team architectural patterns.
• Provide thought leadership: prototype proofs‑of‑concept, evaluate new tools/technologies, bring innovation into the platform.
• Mentor and coach architects, senior engineers, and guide teams through architectural change.
• Collaborate with infrastructure, operations, SRE, security, and Dev Ops to ensure the architecture is operable, observable, and maintainable in production.
• Help define and lead architecture governance (e.g. architecture review board, reference architectures, standards, guidelines).
• Participate in tech strategy, roadmap planning with product & engineering leadership.
• Diagnose and resolve technical debt or architectural “smells” across the codebase, enforcing consistency.

• ~10+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3–5 years in senior architect or principal‑level roles.
• Proven track record of designing and operating large‑scale, distributed systems in production.
• Deep hands‑on experience with orchestration, scheduler systems, job pipelines, or workflow engines.
• Strong proficiency in one or more of the Java / JVM ecosystem, Python, Node.js, or equivalent high‑level backend languages.
• Experience with message/event systems such as Kafka or equivalent, queueing, streaming architectures.
• Familiarity with in‑memory data stores and caching (e.g. Redis).
• Strong knowledge of containerization, Kubernetes, sidecar patterns, service meshes, proxies, etc.
• Understanding or experience in split‑plane architectures (control plane / data plane separation) highly desirable.
• Strong skills in API design, data modeling, integration patterns, error handling, consistency.
• Experience with observability (metrics, tracing, logging) and designing systems for operability and failure modes.
• Ability to conduct performance analysis, capacity planning, scaling, fault tolerance strategies.
• Excellent communication skills—able to articulate tradeoffs, convince stakeholders, write design docs, lead design reviews.
• Ability to function autonomously, make decisions in ambiguity, drive consensus across teams, and adopt/evict technologies as needed.
• Strong judgment about when to optimize vs. simplify.
• Familiarity with high‑scale cloud deployments (AWS, Azure, GCP) and infrastructure‑as‑code is a plus.
• Self‑starter, independent, collaborative, pragmatic, and excellent problem‑solving mindset.

• Quality, consistency, and maintainability of architectural decisions across the platform.
• Reduction in architectural debt and increase in architectural coherence over time.
• Adoption of patterns and standards across teams.
• Ability to resolve cross‑cutting issues and unblock teams in architecture matters.
• Delivery of strategic cross‑domain initiatives or major refactoring with low disruption.
• Mentorship, influence, and raising the architecture maturity of engineering teams.
• System reliability, performance, scalability, and maintainability improvements.

The salary range for this role in the United States is $215,000 – $300,000.…