Principal Engineer

The Principal Engineer is a critical, senior leadership role responsible for driving the technical strategy, architectural coherence, and engineering excellence across several key product areas. This role acts as a bridge between high-level business goals and on-the-ground technical execution, ensuring the product is built correctly, efficiently, and with a long-term vision. The Principal Architect is expected to drive technical excellence by balancing immediate execution needs with the long-term health and scalability of the product's architecture, while understanding the business and customer needs.

Key Responsibilities

Architectural Leadership & Strategy

• Serve as the technical authority for multiple core product areas, ensuring all architectural decisions directly support the business objectives for those areas.
• Establish and maintain organization-wide technical standards, architectural patterns, and coding best practices to ensure consistency, security, performance, and maintainability across all teams.
• Support decision making by providing expert architectural guidance and data-driven recommendations to leadership and engineering teams, facilitating timely and sound technical decisions.

Technical Management & Mentorship

• Directly mentor, guide, and lead the technical direction of the Tech Leads and senior engineers within the domains, fostering a high-performance engineering culture.
• Oversee and approve key design documents and high-level architectural proposals, ensuring they adhere to organizational standards and the own building and maintaining a long-term architectural roadmap.
• Act as an escalation point for complex technical challenges, actively supporting teams in overcoming significant architectural hurdles or design issues.

Communication & Vision

• Pull teams up to give them the big picture and let them see connections: Define and communicate the overall architectural vision and strategy to engineering teams, helping them understand how their individual contributions connect to the broader product and business goals.
• Report on roadmap: Regularly report progress, risks, and technical insights related to the architectural roadmap to executive and product leadership

Qualifications

Experience & Technical Skills

• Professional Experience: 10+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 5+ years as a hands on architect
• System Design: Proven track record of architecting and delivering complex, high-scale, distributed systems (e.g., Microservices, Event-Driven Architecture) in a cloud environment (AWS/GCP/Azure).
• Technical Depth: Deep expertise in our core technology stack: Scala (Java in lieu), Play, Kafka, Flink,  Pulsar, S3
• AI: Experience building or deploying Multi-Agent Frameworks or Multi-Agent Systems.
  • Proven experience working with multiple LLMs (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, etc.) and understanding their strengths and limitations.
  • Expertise in orchestration software like LangGraph or similar frameworks used for building and managing agent workflows.
• Data Engineering, Pipeline and Storage: Strong experience with data architecture, including SQL and NoSQL databases, caching strategies, and data consistency models. Experience in data engineering and data pipeline technologies. Our stack is Elasticsearch, Postgres, Redis and CockroachDB. 
• Operational Excellence: Demonstrated experience with CI/CD pipelines, observability (logging/monitoring/tracing), and DevOps practices. Has experience working with consumer-scale systems at enterprise software companies.

Leadership & Soft Skills

• Influence without Authority: Ability to drive consensus across multiple teams and stakeholders without relying solely on hierarchical authority.
• Business Acumen: Strong ability to translate complex technical concepts into non-technical terms for executive stakeholders and product managers.
• Mentorship: A passion for teaching and upskilling other engineers; experience managing or mentoring Tech Leads is highly desirable.
• Strategic Thinking: Ability to balance "perfect" architecture with pragmatic delivery timelines (knowing when to accept technical debt and when to pay it down).

Preferred Qualifications (Bonus)

• Experience transforming a monolithic architecture into modular, service oriented architecture.
• Experience working directly with customers from both a functionality and triaging standpoint
• Experience working in building messaging/communication platforms at scale.