Principal Engineer
Principal Engineer owning technical strategy for Twilio's Phone Numbers and KYC Compliance platform at massive global scale. Lead architecture modernization, pioneer AI-driven (LLM/agentic) development workflows, mentor engineers, and translate complex telecom regulations into developer-first APIs. Requires 16+ years building highly available distributed cloud systems.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Lead the architecture and long-term technical roadmap, transitioning legacy systems into a modern, distributed microservices architecture that supports global scale.
- Lead by example in using AI coding assistants (GitHub Copilot, Anthropic Claude, or internal LLMs) to automate boilerplate, generate exhaustive test suites, and perform rapid prototyping. Amplify personal and team output through AI augmentation.
- Drive technical excellence across multiple teams, making critical architectural decisions that balance rapid feature innovation with world-class reliability and security.
- Partner with Product Managers to translate complex global telecommunications regulations and customer needs into elegant, developer-first APIs and application workflows.
- Mentor and uplift senior and staff engineers. Foster a culture of technical curiosity, ownership, and continuous learning. Teach the team how to move from "writing code" to "reviewing and orchestrating AI-generated logic" without sacrificing security or quality.
- Identify and mitigate technical risks early, ranging from scalability bottlenecks to security vulnerabilities. Lead the team through complex production incidents with a focus on long-term remediation.
- Communicate complex technical strategies to both executive leadership and engineering teams through high-quality design documents, RFCs, and presentations.
Qualifications
Required:
- 16+ years of experience designing and developing highly available, high scale, secure, mission-critical cloud native enterprise distributed systems.
- Expert Proficiency in Java or Go, with deep knowledge of AWS ecosystems (Lambda, EKS, DynamoDB, Kafka).
- Deep experience with cloud-native infrastructure (AWS preferred), microservices patterns, and designing "five-nines" (99.999%) resilient systems.
- Demonstrated experience using AI tools to significantly accelerate software delivery. Comfortable discussing how LLMs are used for architectural brainstorming, debugging, and code synthesis.
- A track record of building and maintaining high-volume public-facing APIs that focus on exceptional developer experience.
- Experience with high-throughput data processing and storage solutions (SQL/NoSQL, Redis, Kafka, or Spark).
- Proficiency with Kubernetes, Terraform, and modern CI/CD paradigms.
- Proven ability to influence technical strategy across multiple teams and organizational boundaries without direct authority.
Desired:
- Experience with telephony protocols, local number porting (LNP), or global regulatory compliance frameworks.
- Experience building "internal platforms" that enable other developer teams to move faster.
- Experience building or integrating AI agents into internal developer platforms or automated ops workflows.
Skills
Java, Go, AWS, AWS Lambda, EKS, DynamoDB, Kafka, Kubernetes, Terraform, LLMs, Microservices, CI/CD, Redis, Spark
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