Principal Engineer

About the role

This Principal Engineer role focuses on defining and maintaining the technical direction for core product areas. The work involves establishing architectural patterns, ensuring consistency in engineering practices, and providing expert guidance to leadership and development teams. Success in this position means the product is built efficiently with a clear long-term vision, aligning technical execution with business objectives.

The role emphasizes leadership through mentorship and technical oversight. You will guide Tech Leads and senior engineers, fostering a high-performance culture and approving key design documents. This includes acting as a point of escalation for complex technical challenges, helping teams overcome architectural hurdles, and ensuring adherence to organizational standards.

A key aspect of this position is communication and vision-setting. You will articulate the architectural strategy to engineering teams, helping them understand how their contributions fit into broader product goals. Regular reporting on progress, risks, and technical insights to executive and product leadership is also essential, connecting technical roadmaps to business outcomes.

The listed salary range for this full-time remote role is between $200,000 and $350,000 USD.

Skills that matter here

• Scala: This role requires deep expertise in Scala, or Java as an alternative, as a core technology for building the company's systems.
• Kafka: Experience with Kafka is essential for architecting and delivering high-scale, distributed systems, particularly in event-driven architectures.
• Flink: Expertise in Flink is needed for data engineering, specifically for processing data streams and building robust data pipelines.
• Pulsar: Pulsar is a key technology for this role, contributing to the development of distributed systems and data infrastructure.
• S3: Experience with S3 is required for working with cloud environments and managing data storage solutions.
• Elasticsearch: This role involves strong experience with Elasticsearch as part of data architecture, including storage and retrieval strategies.

Who this role suits

• You are a seasoned architect with over 5 years in a hands-on architectural capacity, capable of designing complex, distributed systems.
• You thrive on mentoring and guiding senior engineers, fostering their technical growth and leadership.
• You possess strong business acumen, able to translate technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders and drive consensus across teams without direct authority.
• You are a strategic thinker who can balance the pursuit of ideal architectural solutions with pragmatic delivery timelines.

From the employer

Architectural Leadership & Strategy

• Serve as the technical authority for multiple core product areas, ensuring all architectural decisions directly support the business objectives for those areas.
• Establish and maintain organization-wide technical standards, architectural patterns, and coding best practices to ensure consistency, security, performance, and maintainability across all teams.
• Support decision making by providing expert architectural guidance and data-driven recommendations to leadership and engineering teams, facilitating timely and sound technical decisions.

Technical Management & Mentorship

• Directly mentor, guide, and lead the technical direction of the Tech Leads and senior engineers within the domains, fostering a high-performance engineering culture.
• Oversee and approve key design documents and high-level architectural proposals, ensuring they adhere to organizational standards and the own building and maintaining a long-term architectural roadmap.
• Act as an escalation point for complex technical challenges, actively supporting teams in overcoming significant architectural hurdles or design issues.

Communication & Vision

• Pull teams up to give them the big picture and let them see connections: Define and communicate the overall architectural vision and strategy to engineering teams, helping them understand how their individual contributions connect to the broader product and business goals.
• Report on roadmap: Regularly report progress, risks, and technical insights related to the architectural roadmap to executive and product leadership.

Experience & Technical Skills

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 5+ years as a hands-on architect.
• System Design: Proven track record of architecting and delivering complex, high-scale, distributed systems (e.g., Microservices, Event-Driven Architecture) in a cloud environment (AWS/GCP/Azure).
• Technical Depth: Deep expertise in core technology stack: Scala (Java in lieu), Play, Kafka, Flink, Pulsar, S3.
• AI: Experience building or deploying Multi-Agent Frameworks or Multi-Agent Systems; working with multiple LLMs (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, etc.) and understanding their strengths and limitations; expertise in orchestration software like LangGraph or similar frameworks.
• Data Engineering, Pipeline and Storage: Strong experience with data architecture, including SQL and NoSQL databases, caching strategies, and data consistency models; experience in data engineering and data pipeline technologies; stack includes Elasticsearch, Postgres, Redis, CockroachDB.
• Operational Excellence: CI/CD, observability (logging/monitoring/tracing), and DevOps practices; experience with consumer-scale systems at enterprise software companies.

Leadership & Soft Skills

• Influence without Authority: ability to drive consensus across multiple teams and stakeholders without relying solely on hierarchical authority.
• Business Acumen: translate complex technical concepts for executive stakeholders and product managers.
• Mentorship: passion for teaching and upskilling engineers; experience managing or mentoring Tech Leads is desirable.
• Strategic Thinking: balance architecture perfection with pragmatic delivery timelines.