We are seeking a
Principal Software Engineer to serve as a technical authority and strategic architect for our Cloud Engineering organization. In this role, you will define the architectural vision and drive the execution of our next-generation, global multi-cloud SaaS platform.
Your work will fundamentally shape how global enterprises deploy, operate, and scale Aerospike at extreme velocity and petabyte scale-pushing the absolute limits of real-time, always-on distributed systems.
What You'll Do- Architect at Enterprise Scale: Drive the multi-year technical vision, architecture, and roadmap for our multi-cloud SaaS platform, ensuring high availability, sub-millisecond efficiency, and seamless multi-tenancy.
- Establish Engineering Standards: Set the bar for system design, security, reliability, operational excellence, and testing across the entire engineering organization.
- Drive Technical Leadership & Strategy: Partner closely with executive stakeholders, product leadership, and principal architects to translate complex enterprise needs into scalable, resilient platform capabilities.
- Force Multiply: Mentor and elevate senior and staff engineers, foster a culture of deep technical rigor, and guide distributed teams through complex technical tradeoffs.
- Solve the Unsolved: Tackle the toughest performance, state management, orchestration, and topology challenges inherent in running real-time databases across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
Key Responsibilities- Lead the architectural design and strategic execution of complex cloud-native control planes, data planes, and underlying microservice ecosystems.
- Design for extreme scale: optimize distributed runtime environments, auto-scaling mechanisms, cross-region replication, and stateful workload orchestration.
- Author critical platform primitives, framework standards, and foundational code while reviewing high-impact designs across teams.
- Serve as a primary escalation point for critical architectural risks, systemic performance bottlenecks, and high-severity platform outages.
- Influence platform ecosystem strategy, including Kubernetes operator patterns, infrastructure-as-code automation, and workflow orchestration.
Required Qualifications- 10+ years of hands-on experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems and cloud platforms.
- Proven Track Record: Experience acting in a Principal, Staff+, or Lead Architect capacity for a high-growth SaaS, IaaS, or database platform.
- Deep Distributed Systems Expertise: Mastery of fault tolerance, consensus protocols, multi-tenant isolation, data partitioning, and consistency models.
- Cloud-Native Systems Mastery: Deep expertise in Go (preferred) or other statically typed languages (Java, C++, Rust), alongside advanced Kubernetes internals and custom controller/operator development.
- Multi-Cloud Architecture: Deep production experience across major public clouds (AWS, GCP, Azure) at massive scale.
- Data & Storage Systems: Deep conceptual and practical understanding of NoSQL internals, access patterns, storage engine mechanics, and high-throughput data pipelines.
- Operational & Reliability Excellence: Experience establishing SLOs/SLIs, designing robust self-healing systems, and leading chaos engineering or incident post-mortem practices.
Preferred Qualifications- Direct experience building Kubernetes Operators (e.g., Kubebuilder, Operator SDK) for stateful applications.
- Experience with orchestration engines like Temporal.
- Proficiency with Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, OpenTofu) and modern cloud-native observability stacks (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana).
- Prior experience in database-as-a-service (DBaaS), infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), or low-latency systems.
- Active contribution to relevant open-source projects in the cloud-native or distributed storage ecosystem.
Salary Range: $260,000 - $320,000
(Actual compensation will be based on experience, location, and other relevant factors.)
