Principal Software Engineer

Who you are

• Experience leveraging or critically thinking about how to integrate AI into engineering and platform work — whether using AI-powered tooling, automating operational workflows, building agentic systems for fleet visibility and operations, or reasoning about AI’s impact on how infrastructure is built and run
• 12+ years of experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems in production, with deep expertise running Kubernetes at scale (multi-cluster, multi-region, multi-tenant)
• Hands-on, authoritative experience across one or more major hyperscalers (AWS, Azure, GCP), including their managed Kubernetes offerings (EKS, AKS, GKE) and the networking, IAM, and capacity tradeoffs that come with each
• A proven track record of providing technical leadership across multiple engineering teams, influencing architecture and direction without relying on positional authority
• Deep expertise in the core building blocks of a modern platform: the operator/controller pattern, infrastructure-as-code and control planes (e.g., Crossplane), GitOps-based delivery, container networking (CNI), and service mesh
• Strong programming skills in Go and fluency across the cloud-native ecosystem
• Experience designing identity and trust fabrics for distributed systems — workload identity, mTLS, and standards such as SPIFFE/SPIRE
• Experience with multi-tenant workload isolation and runtime security (e.g., Kata Containers, sandboxed runtimes)
• Experience building and operating platforms for regulated or federal markets (FedRAMP, air-gapped or self-hosted distribution, OCI bundling)
• Experience with observability at scale — metrics, tracing, and SLO-driven operations across a large fleet
• A platform-as-product mindset: treating internal engineering teams as customers and the platform as a product with a roadmap, contracts, and a delivery pipeline

What the job involves

• We are currently seeking a Distinguished Engineer. In this role, you will have org-wide technical authority, giving you the ability to set technical direction across multiple engineering organizations
• You will own the hardest, most ambiguous problems in the platform domain
• You will set the technical direction for our cloud-native platform across multiple engineering teams and organizations, defining the architecture and standards for how Kubernetes, distributed systems, and hyperscaler infrastructure are built and operated at scale
• You will own the hardest, most ambiguous technical problems in the platform domain — multi-cloud topology, control-plane design, workload isolation, identity and trust fabric, and reliability at the scale of hundreds of clusters and dozens of product workloads
• You will partner with engineering fellows, principal engineers, and other senior technical leaders to drive consistent architectural decisions and the adoption of best practices across the entire platform ecosystem
• You will identify and mitigate the biggest technical risks in initiatives with C-suite visibility, and you will be the person leadership trusts to make the call on managed vs. self-managed tradeoffs, substrate portability, and multi-hyperscaler strategy
• Where you see the need, you will personally design and build the critical components — control planes, operators, infrastructure abstractions, and the systems other teams build on top of
• You will mentor staff and principal engineers and shape the next generation of the organization’s technical leadership

Benefits

• Generous family leave
• Matched donations
• Annual learning stipends
• Flexible PTO
• Competitive retirement plan
• Paid volunteer time