Principal Engineer, Product Engineering

Principal Engineer

We are hiring a Principal Engineer to help define the technical direction for core product experiences at 1Password.

This is a senior individual contributor role for an engineer who can translate ambitious product strategy into systems that scale technically and operationally. You will drive architecture, engineering standards, and technical direction across the product ecosystem, working across client applications, distributed services, data platforms, and shared infrastructure to build experiences that are secure, reliable, performant, and maintainable. This is not a role scoped to a single team or subsystem. The expectation is organization-level technical leadership: shaping how Product Engineering approaches complex cross-cutting problems, guiding long-term architectural investments, and establishing the technical patterns and operational standards other teams build against.

You will operate across the full lifecycle of product engineering work, from architecture and system design through production operations and long-term evolution. Success in this role requires balancing product velocity with engineering durability, making pragmatic technical tradeoffs, and driving alignment across teams with different priorities and constraints.

You will help evolve the next generation of 1Password's product architecture, including the responsible integration of AI capabilities into core product experiences. Security and privacy by default, cross-platform consistency, operational resilience, and enterprise-scale reliability are foundational requirements that must be reflected in every architectural decision.

If you want to build systems used daily by millions of individuals and hundreds of thousands of businesses, and solve engineering problems where distributed systems, reliability, usability, security, and intelligent automation all matter simultaneously, this is that role.

This is a remote opportunity within Canada and the US.

What we're looking for:

• You have designed and operated large-scale distributed systems where reliability, scalability, maintainability, and operational excellence matter.
• You have deep experience driving architecture and technical direction across multiple teams, organizations, or product domains.
• You have strong systems-thinking instincts and can reason effectively about platform boundaries, distributed systems constraints, developer ergonomics, and long-term technical sustainability.
• You have experience building customer-facing product systems across clients, APIs, distributed services, cloud infrastructure, and data platforms.
• You have experience building or scaling event-driven systems, microservices architectures, or shared platform infrastructure in production environments.
• You have practical experience integrating AI or ML capabilities into production applications and understand the engineering tradeoffs involved in introducing AI into trust-sensitive product experiences.
• You have strong instincts for privacy-preserving and security-conscious system design, including thoughtful handling of telemetry, user data, permissions, and auditability.
• You are effective at driving alignment across teams with different incentives, priorities, and technical perspectives.
• You communicate clearly with engineers, executives, and cross-functional partners, and can explain complex technical tradeoffs in practical terms.
• You are comfortable operating in ambiguity and helping organizations make durable technical decisions before every variable is known.

Bonus points for:

• Experience in identity, authentication, authorization, secrets management, enterprise security, or trust-oriented product domains.
• Experience building large-scale event-driven or multi-region distributed systems in cloud environments.
• Experience building cross-platform applications or shared platform architectures at scale.
• Experience with developer platforms, internal engineering frameworks, CI/CD systems, or large-scale infrastructure modernization initiatives.
• Experience integrating LLMs or AI-assisted workflows into customer-facing SaaS applications.
• Experience with endpoint trust, browser or extension security, enterprise administration workflows, or device posture systems.
• Experience mentoring engineers and raising the engineering bar across organizations through technical leadership and operational excellence.

What you can expect:

• Define architecture and technical direction for core product capabilities spanning clients, distributed services, data platforms, and shared infrastructure.
• Establish engineering standards and reusable architectural patterns for scalable, maintainable, and resilient product systems across Product Engineering.
• Drive long-term technical strategy across critical product areas, balancing immediate delivery needs with scalability, operational excellence, and platform sustainability.
• Partner closely with Product, Design, Security, Privacy, Infrastructure, and Data teams to ensure technical decisions support both customer outcomes and long-term operational durability.
• Guide how AI-powered capabilities are integrated into customer-facing product experiences, ensuring systems are reliable, observable, operationally safe, and aligned with customer trust expectations.
• Define engineering expectations for AI-enabled product systems, including evaluation frameworks, rollout safety, telemetry, fallback behavior, auditability, and operational controls.
• Establish shared platform capabilities and infrastructure patterns that allow teams to build product features consistently across clients, services, APIs, and AI-assisted workflows.
• Influence and drive key architectural decisions around distributed systems design, event-driven architectures, synchronization models, scalability, performance, reliability, extensibility, and platform interoperability.
• Help teams navigate difficult technical tradeoffs, unblock large cross-functional initiatives, and reduce systemic engineering complexity across the organization.
• Raise the operational bar for production systems through stronger reliability practices, observability standards, incident readiness, performance analysis, and engineering discipline.
• Mentor and influence engineers across the organization through technical leadership, architecture reviews, design guidance, and hands-on problem solving.

What success looks like:

• Durable architectural patterns that enable teams to move faster with less duplication and lower operational overhead.
• Product systems that scale reliably across platforms, enterprise environments, and growing customer complexity.
• Engineering teams making more consistent technical decisions with clearer standards and stronger shared foundations.
• AI-powered product experiences that are useful, measurable, trustworthy, and operationally safe.
• Reduced systemic friction across development, delivery, observability, and cross-team coordination.
• Stronger operational resilience, including improved reliability, debuggability, rollout safety, and incident response readiness.
• Technical investments that improve long-term engineering velocity instead of creating organizational drag or platform fragmentation.

USA-based roles only: The annual base salary for this role is between $246,000 USD and $369,000 USD, plus immediate participation in 1Password's benefits program (health, dental, 401k and many others), utilization of our generous paid time off, an equity grant and, where applicable, participation in our incentive programs.

Canada-based roles only: The annual base salary for this role is between $228,000 CAD and $342,000 CAD, plus immediate participation in 1Password's generous benefits program (health, dental, RRSP and many others), utilization of our generous paid time off, an equity grant and, where applicable, participation in our incentive programs.

At 1Password, we approach each individual's compensation with a promise of fair market value and internal equity commensurate with experience and specific skill set. This posting is for an existing vacancy.

Our culture At 1Password, we prioritize collaboration, clear and transparent communication, receptiveness to feedback, and alignment with our core values: keep it simple, lead with honesty, and put people first. You'll be part of a team that challenges the status quo, and is excited to experiment and iterate in search of the best solution. That said, 1Password is not for everyone. Our work is demanding, we strive for excellence, and the pace is fast. We need people who are keen to take on challenging problems, who seek feedback to grow, and who are driven to make an impact. If you're looking for a place where you can settle into a comfortable routine, this might not be the right fit for you. We're looking for individuals who are proven experts in their fields, as well as those who are highly adaptable, can thrive in ambiguity and through change, are curious, and above all deliver results.

How we work with AI We are committed to leveraging cutting-edge technology—including AI—to achieve our mission. We also understand that thinking critically about AI in its current forms will help us create better solutions for our customers and ourselves with its future forms, which will help us continue to close the gap between security and privacy and achieve our mission. We want team members at all levels to take the approach of actively learning AI best practices, identifying opportunities to apply AI in meaningful ways, and driving innovative solutions in their daily work. Embracing the future of AI isn't just encouraged—it's an essential part of how we will be successful at 1Password.

Our approach to remote work We believe in the power of remote work, but recognize that in-person connection is important to help us