Principal Engineer - Core

Responsibilities

• Set the long-term architecture strategy for our event-driven platform, proactively eliminating risks and simplifying the codebase to prevent systemic technical debt.
• Drive strategically critical, cross-vertical initiatives. Establish the patterns and trade-off frameworks that become the standard for building, operating, and scaling systems.
• Serve as an ultimate escalation point for complex distributed systems problems, providing technical guidance to resolve high-stakes issues and unblock teams.
• Mentor and elevate senior engineers and technical leaders, fostering a culture of accountability and raising the technical ceiling of the entire organization.
• Partner with product and business leaders to define technical strategy, navigating ambiguity to build consensus on high-impact initiatives.
• Champion organizational excellence by setting standards for testing, observability, incident response, and platform resilience.
• Represent the organization externally through technical writing, conference talks, and open-source contributions, bringing external innovation in and sharing our progress with the broader community.

Qualifications

• 15+ years of overall software engineering experience, including 10+ years operating at Senior Staff or above - owning technical design for large, cross-team projects.
• Experience leading programs that span multiple teams or verticals over a multi-quarter timeline, with minimal oversight.
• Proven ability to identify business-critical problems and build the case for new investment, independent of being assigned the work.
• Track record of setting technical patterns or standards that other teams have adopted without your direct involvement.
• Experience mentoring Staff/Senior Staff engineers and contributing to their growth toward technical leadership.
• Strong track record leading through incidents or operational risk, with a focus on systemic hardening rather than one-off fixes.
• Excellent communication skills, with experience building consensus across both engineering and business/executive stakeholders.

Preferred