Principal Distributed Systems Engineer

Responsibilities

• Own the distributed backend architecture and multi-year technical roadmap, including platform availability, scalability, and cost targets.
• Lead architecture reviews and define design standards, reference architectures, decision records, and cross-team technical initiatives.
• Architect high-throughput ingestion, network telemetry, event streaming, time-series storage, and data APIs.
• Build production services, prototypes, and reference implementations while reviewing critical designs and code.
• Establish observability, multi-tenant isolation, access control, data governance, reliability, and incident-response practices.
• Set the multi-cloud Kubernetes and infrastructure-as-code architecture across AWS, GCP, and Azure.
• Mentor Senior, Staff, and Senior Staff engineers and act as a cross-organizational technical authority.

Requirements

• 15+ years of software engineering experience building and operating distributed backend systems and platforms at scale, or an equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Demonstrated hands-on architecture experience defining multi-year roadmaps for large-scale distributed platforms and delivering them to production.
• Deep experience with event streaming, high-throughput ingestion pipelines, and time-series or large-scale data stores.
• Strong knowledge of distributed-systems concepts including consistency models, failure modes, backpressure, idempotency, and delivery-semantics tradeoffs.
• Hands-on proficiency in Go, Rust, Java, or Scala and the ability to build reference implementations and review production code.
• Extensive AWS or other cloud-native architecture experience involving containerization, Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code, security, and cost optimization.
• Experience designing multi-tenant platforms with data isolation, access control, governance, observability, and reliability frameworks.
• Established record of setting technical direction beyond one team, influencing stakeholders, and mentoring senior engineers across distributed organizations.
• Preferred qualifications include a master’s degree, Go or Rust production experience, network telemetry and management experience, graph databases, AI/ML platform infrastructure, regulated-environment experience, and open-source or technical-writing contributions.

Benefits

• Onsite role in Santa Clara, California, with up to 15% domestic or international travel.
• Base salary range of $212,000–$265,000 USD, plus bonus and equity.
• Medical, dental, and vision plans; matching 401(k); unlimited PTO; and paid holidays.
• Parental and adoption leave, legal insurance, and a home technology stipend.