Principal Software Engineer

Principal Engineer

ZoomInfo is where careers accelerate. We move fast, think boldly, and empower you to do the best work of your life. You'll be surrounded by teammates who care deeply, challenge each other, and celebrate wins. With tools that amplify your impact and a culture that backs your ambition, you won't just contribute. You'll make things happen–fast.

As a Principal Engineer on our Advertising, Company Intelligence, and Intent team, you'll help design and implement the core systems that power our real-time marketing platform. From high-throughput ad infrastructure to large-scale identity resolution and intelligent systems enhanced by LLMs, push the boundaries of scale, intelligence, and speed—and deliver real-world business impact.

You'll be joining a team with a broad range of ambitious, technically deep projects—from APIs that process tens of billions of events per day, to new buyer intent algorithms powered by LLMs, to a unified B2B identity graph. Depending on your strengths and interests, you'll be matched to the initiatives where you can have the greatest impact.

This is a high-growth, high-ownership environment operating at the edge of what's possible in modern software engineering, data infrastructure, and applied AI.

What You'll Do

• Design and build distributed systems that process, enrich, and respond to billions of behavioral events per day in real time
• Develop high-performance APIs and services that support advertising, identity, and intent features across the Marketing Platform
• Leverage machine learning and large language models (LLMs) to analyze behavioral data, classify content, extract signals, and enable intelligent decision-making
• Build intelligent agents using frameworks like LangGraph or MCP to reason over data and power user-facing insights
• Design and operate data pipelines using tools like Kafka, Kinesis, and ClickHouse to support both streaming and batch workloads
• Drive quality, performance, scalability, and observability across all systems you own
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product managers, data scientists, and engineers to deliver customer-facing features and internal tooling
• Contribute to technical leadership and mentorship of teammates

What We're Looking For

• 8+ years of backend, data, or infrastructure engineering experience, or equivalent impact and leadership.
• Strong experience in at least one of the following:
• Distributed systems engineering (e.g., building low latency high and throughput APIs, scalable microservices, event processing pipelines)
• Big data infrastructure (e.g., streaming, warehousing, low-latency storage at scale)
• Applied AI/ML, including use of LLMs for extraction, classification, or reasoning tasks
• Proficiency in one or more core languages: Java, Go, Python
• Solid grasp of SQL and large-scale data modeling
• Familiarity with databases and tools such as ClickHouse, DynamoDB, Bigtable, Memcached, Kafka, Kinesis, Firehose, Airflow, Snowflake

AI-Native Development Mindset

• Comfortable using LLMs as part of your development workflow—whether via tools like Copilot, Cursor, ChatGPT, Claude, or others—to boost productivity, explore architecture ideas, and rapidly prototype.
• Skilled at designing and implementing LLM-powered systems such as RAG pipelines, agent frameworks (e.g., LangGraph), or intelligent workflows that reason across large datasets in real time.

Bonus Points

• Experience in ad tech, real-time bidding (RTB), or programmatic systems
• Background in identity resolution, attribution, or behavioral analytics at scale
• Contributions to open source in ML, infrastructure, or data tooling
• Strong product instincts and a passion for building tools that drive meaningful outcomes

Actual compensation offered will be based on factors such as the candidate's work location, qualifications, skills, experience and/or training. Your recruiter can share more information about the specific salary range for your desired work location during the hiring process. We want our employees and their families to thrive.

In addition to comprehensive benefits we offer holistic mind, body and lifestyle programs designed for overall well-being. Learn more about ZoomInfo benefits here.

Below is the US base salary for this position. Additional compensation such as Bonus, Commission, Equity and other benefits may also apply.

$163,800—$257,400 USD

About us: ZoomInfo (NASDAQ: GTM) is the Go-To-Market Intelligence Platform that empowers businesses to grow faster with AI-ready insights, trusted data, and advanced automation. Its solutions provide more than 35,000 companies worldwide with a complete view of their customers, making every seller their best seller.

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ZoomInfo may use a software-based assessment as part of the recruitment process. More information about this tool, including the results of the most recent bias audit, is available here.

ZoomInfo is proud to be an equal opportunity employer, hiring based on qualifications, merit, and business needs, and does not discriminate based on protected status. We welcome all applicants and are committed to providing equal employment opportunities regardless of sex, race, age, color, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, disability status, religion, protected military or veteran status, medical condition, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We also consider qualified candidates with criminal histories in accordance with legal requirements.

For Massachusetts Applicants: It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability. ZoomInfo does not administer lie detector tests to applicants in any location.