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.