Principal Software Engineer – Data Platform

Job description

Staff / Principal Software Engineer – Data Platform About the Role: We’re building the platform that powers analytics, experimentation, observability, and AI across the company. This is not a traditional data role. You’ll work on distributed systems, storage, query execution, and developer infrastructure that processes billions of events with low latency and high reliability. A key part of this role involves evolving our data platform architecture—designing and building scalable, cost-efficient systems that reduce reliance on external managed solutions while improving performance, flexibility, and control. If you enjoy building foundational systems used by many teams, this role is for you. What You'll Build Real-Time Data Platform: High-throughput ingestion and processing of billions of events, with low latency, strong guarantees, and cost-efficient storage. Analytics Infrastructure: Petabyte-scale analytics systems with fast query performance, efficient storage, and optimized execution. You’ll also work on designing and building core analytical capabilities in-house, including storage layers, compute orchestration, and query execution systems that can scale with growing data needs. Experimentation & Product Intelligence: Systems for experimentation, metrics, segmentation, and data validation that enable fast, reliable product decisions. AI & Developer Platforms: Infrastructure for AI-native systems including retrieval, debugging, knowledge graphs, and agent tooling. Platform Reliability: Data quality, lineage, monitoring, and systems that ensure trust, correctness, and scalability. Problems You'll Solve \\* Scaling ingestion and storage for massive data volumes \\* Enabling fast queries over large datasets \\* Designing efficient storage and indexing strategies \\* Building reliable experimentation systems \\* Improving debugging and observability with data \\* Supporting AI systems with robust infrastructure \\* Maintaining data correctness and evolving systems safely \\* Designing and operating large-scale data processing systems with strong performance and cost efficiency \\* Building internal platform capabilities that replace or augment external data infrastructure What We're Looking For Experience building large-scale systems such as: \\* Distributed systems or data infrastructure \\* Storage or query engines \\* Stream processing or observability platforms \\* High-throughput backend or developer platforms \\* Data processing frameworks or large-scale compute systems Strong interest in systems topics like databases, performance, reliability, and scalability. Experience or interest in designing and operating data platforms end-to-end, including storage, compute, and orchestration layers. Comfort with ambiguity and driving complex, cross-team initiatives. What Success Looks Like \\* Define technical direction across the platform \\* Build foundational systems used across the company \\* Influence architecture and improve engineering quality \\* Mentor engineers and lead complex initiatives \\* Simplify systems while improving scale, reliability, and cost efficiency \\* Drive evolution of the data platform toward more scalable, flexible, and internally owned infrastructure Technology Landscape You’ll work across distributed systems, analytics databases, cloud infrastructure, streaming systems, and AI tooling. We prioritize solving the right problems over specific tools. Why This Role? You’ll build core infrastructure that enables teams to move faster, make better decisions, and work with AI. You’ll also play a key role in shaping the long-term architecture of our data platform—building systems that give us greater control, performance, and efficiency at scale. If you enjoy solving hard systems problems with broad impact, you’ll thrive here.