Principal Software Engineer - (Reston or Cambridge)

Our team's mission is to accelerate innovation by making computing simple, scalable, accessible, and affordable for all. We provide the infrastructure and services that enable developers to build next-generation applications. We take ownership of the design and development of core compute interfaces, virtualization management, APIs, and low-level platform services.

As a technical authority, you will drive engineering excellence through robust solution design. You will integrate Site Reliability Engineering principles to ensure web applications, APIs, and automation platforms excel in reliability. Additionally, you will build specialty tooling to maintain our globally distributed infrastructure.

As a Principal Software Engineer Lead, you will be responsible for:

Architecting complex distributed software systems and authoring technical blueprints to eliminate operational toil

Establishing development standards, pull request review frameworks, and Service Level Objectives to maintain system resilience

Designing deployment safety pipelines, continuous integration workflows, and automated testing frameworks for secure production releases

Serving as the Tier-3 escalation authority for complex application failures and leading postmortem reviews

Mentoring engineering teams on system design while cultivating an inclusive and collaborative technical culture

To be successful in this role you will:

Have 12 years of relevant experience and a Bachelor's degree

Have experience developing full-stack web applications, APIs, and microservices in Linux or Unix environments

Possess expertise in languages such as Python, JavaScript, SQL, Ruby, or PHP

Be knowledgeable about CI/CD pipelines, containerization, automated testing, and revision control workflows

Demonstrate solid grounding in SRE principles, including SLI/SLO tracking, toil reduction, and root-cause analysis

Demonstrate success creating architectural blueprints, evaluating emerging technologies, and mentoring engineering peers

Possess US Citizenship, and be eligible to undergo the required security clearance process; an active clearance is not required.

At Akamai, we make life better for billions of people, trillions of times a day. Whether you're streaming live events, scrolling social media, watching your favorite series, or managing your savings, we're the engine behind the scenes. We provide the world's most distributed platform from Cloud to Edge to help the giants of the digital world work faster and stay more secure, making the internet a better experience for everyone. Our focus is simple: Cloud and Edge: Running apps closer to users for instant performance. Security : Neutralizing threats before they ever reach your data. Content Delivery : Scaling the world's biggest moments without a glitch. AI : Enabling our customers to build, secure, and scale AI apps on the world's most distributed cloud platform. At Akamai, we don't just support the internet; we power and protect it, because behind every great digital experience is a massive hidden challenge. And we're the ones who solve it. When millions of people hit play or pay, Akamai ensures it just works.

Akamai's FlexBase program is yet another way we show our commitment to providing employees with an exceptional workplace experience. It's not about telling employees where to work; it's about supporting employees to do their best work. We trust our incredible employees to work in ways that suit them best: at home, in an office, or a combination of both.

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