Principal Software Engineer

Key Responsibilities

• Define and drive the long-term architecture and technical direction of core systems, particularly across networking, storage, low-level I/O, and hardware interaction.
• Act as a technical authority and escalation point for complex, high-impact systems, scalability, reliability, and performance challenges.
• Lead cross-functional and cross-team technical initiatives spanning multiple subsystems and engineering groups.
• Establish architectural principles, performance standards, engineering practices, and design guidelines across the organization.
• Translate customer and business requirements into durable technical strategies and influence product and engineering roadmaps.
• Guide and review architecture and design for performance-critical systems, ensuring correctness, consistency, scalability, and maintainability.
• Mentor Staff and Senior Staff engineers, helping develop technical leaders and raising the overall systems engineering bar.
• Represent systems architecture and technical capabilities internally and, where appropriate, with customers, partners, and the broader technical community.
• Own the end-to-end benchmarking strategy, developing rigorous methodologies to demonstrate throughput, latency, scalability, and total cost-of-ownership advantages.
• Leverage AI and machine learning models to automate complex test generation, perform root-cause analysis, analyze high-dimensional performance data, and predict system behavior under stress.
• Partner closely with Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success teams to provide technical expertise and performance evidence that supports enterprise customer engagements and strategic deals.

Minimum Qualifications

• Expert-level proficiency in C/C++, with deep expertise in low-level programming, memory management, concurrency, and performance optimization.
• Strong understanding of database internals, including storage engines, query execution, indexing, transactions, and related database architecture.
• Deep knowledge of Linux operating-system internals, including scheduling, memory management, I/O subsystems, and system-level performance.
• 10–17 years of experience building and operating complex systems software such as distributed databases, networking stacks, kernels, or storage systems.
• Proven experience defining and evolving architecture for large-scale, performance-critical production systems.
• Demonstrated ability to drive technical decisions and architectural initiatives across multiple teams without direct management authority.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Excellent technical judgment with the ability to balance short-term delivery requirements against long-term platform scalability, reliability, and maintainability.
• Key Responsibilities
• Define and drive the long-term architecture and technical direction of core systems, particularly across networking, storage, low-level I/O, and hardware interaction.
• Act as a technical authority and escalation point for complex, high-impact systems, scalability, reliability, and performance challenges.
• Lead cross-functional and cross-team technical initiatives spanning multiple subsystems and engineering groups.
• Establish architectural principles, performance standards, engineering practices, and design guidelines across the organization.
• Translate customer and business requirements into durable technical strategies and influence product and engineering roadmaps.
• Guide and review architecture and design for performance-critical systems, ensuring correctness, consistency, scalability, and maintainability.
• Mentor Staff and Senior Staff engineers, helping develop technical leaders and raising the overall systems engineering bar.
• Represent systems architecture and technical capabilities internally and, where appropriate, with customers, partners, and the broader technical community.
• Own the end-to-end benchmarking strategy, developing rigorous methodologies to demonstrate throughput, latency, scalability, and total cost-of-ownership advantages.
• Leverage AI and machine learning models to automate complex test generation, perform root-cause analysis, analyze high-dimensional performance data, and predict system behavior under stress.
• Partner closely with Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success teams to provide technical expertise and performance evidence that supports enterprise customer engagements and strategic deals.

Preferred Qualifications

• Deep experience with large-scale distributed systems and their internals, including distributed storage or database platforms.
• Strong understanding of distributed-systems concepts, including the CAP theorem, consistency models, replication, and consensus protocols such as Raft and Paxos.
• Advanced knowledge of database internals, ACID properties, indexing techniques, query execution, and storage engines.
• Expertise in performance engineering for high-throughput, low-latency systems operating at scale.
• Experience with Linux kernel development, filesystem architecture, or advanced operating-system and hardware tuning.
• Familiarity with PCIe, NVMe, DMA, RDMA, epoll, io_uring, and other low-level hardware and operating-system interfaces.
• Experience establishing or influencing company-wide engineering standards, architecture, and technical direction.
• Experience applying AI/ML techniques to performance engineering, automated testing, system diagnostics, or production analysis.
• Must-Have Skills
• C++
• Database Systems
• Distributed Databases
• Distributed Systems
• Systems Programming
• Performance Optimization
• Good-to-Have Skills
• Database Internals
• Linux Kernel
• Storage Systems
• Networking
• AI/ML for Automation
• Performance Engineering

Must-Have Skills

Good-to-Have Skills