Principal Software Engineer - Infrastructure

Role Overview The company's Infrastructure organization is the backbone of everything our users experience. From the real‑time delivery of over 40 million events per second to storing trillions of messages, our systems power the connections between more than 200 million active users. As a Principal Engineer, you will operate across the infrastructure teams to shape our technical vision and keep the company running reliably at massive scale. We are looking for someone who thrives at the intersection of deep technical expertise and organizational leadership. You will contribute to the long‑term infrastructure roadmap, tackle our most complex and ambiguous technical challenges, and ensure the company's systems remain reliable, efficient, and ready for the next 200 million users. You will Lead the company's most critical infrastructure initiatives. Define and drive the technical vision and multi‑year roadmap for Infrastructure, aligning teams around shared architectural principles. Partner with leadership across the company to ensure infrastructure capabilities enable product innovation. Design systems that balance reliability, cost‑efficiency, and scalability. Mentor and grow senior engineers across multiple teams, raising the technical bar organization‑wide. Represent the company's engineering culture externally through blog posts, conference talks, and open source contributions. You have 10+ years of experience building and operating large‑scale distributed systems. Experience architecting complex infrastructure serving hundreds of millions of users with strict uptime requirements. Deep expertise in backend systems, databases, and the operational realities of running systems at scale. Ability to navigate significant ambiguity and make sound technical decisions that hold up over time. Experience influencing technical direction across many teams without direct authority. Strong communication skills and ability to articulate complex technical concepts to any audience and build alignment around your vision. A passion for mentorship and raising the capabilities of engineers around you. Bonus points Experience with Rust, Elixir, or Python in production systems. Expertise with distributed databases like ScyllaDB, Cassandra, or similar. Expertise building large‑scale chat products. History of open source contributions. Things that might interest you Our languages: Rust, Elixir, and Python. Our databases: ScyllaDB, Postgres and Elasticsearch. Our systems are deployed in Google Cloud. Our infrastructure teams have published many blog posts: How the company Stores Trillions of Messages; Maxjourney: Pushing the company’s Limits with a Million+ Online Users in a Single Server; Modern Image Formats at the company: Supporting WebP and AVIF; How the company Supercharges Network Disks for Extreme Low Latency; Using Rust to Scale Elixir for 11 Million Concurrent Users; Why the company is switching from Go to Rust. One of our engineers literally wrote the book on ScyllaDB. We open sourced some of our work, like our media processing library lilliput, or various Elixir utilities like manifold, sorted_set_nif and more. Location and Relocation Candidates must reside in or be willing to relocate to the San Francisco Bay Area (Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, and Sonoma counties). The hiring manager would like folks to be in the office one day a week. Relocation assistance may be available. Compensation The US base salary range for this full‑time position is $450,000 to $600,000 plus equity and benefits. Salary ranges are determined by role and level and are adjusted based on job‑related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. The stated range reflects the base salary only and does not include equity or benefits. EEO & Inclusion The company is committed to inclusion and providing reasonable accommodations during the interview process. If you need reasonable accommodations, please let your recruiter know. Privacy Please see our Applicant and Candidate Privacy Policy for details regarding the company’s collection and usage of personal information relating to the application and recruitment process by clicking HERE. #J-18808-Ljbffr United States Digital Space LLC