Principal Engineer

What You Will Own

Technical Strategy & Architecture

• Own the multi-year technical vision for messaging infrastructure, ensuring architectural decisions position Weave for scale, reliability, and competitive advantage
• Drive architectural coherence across multiple teams, identifying and resolving cross-system dependencies and technical debt at the platform level
• Lead technical due diligence for major initiatives, including build-vs-buy decisions, vendor evaluations, and platform migrations

Cross-Team Problem Solving

• Identify and solve company-level technical problems that span organizational boundaries—the problems that are too complex, too cross-cutting, or too ambiguous for any single team to own
• Compile information across systems, teams, and projects to develop comprehensive solutions with extensive validation, rollback, and testing plans
• Forecast project costs in time, money, and opportunity cost; account for impacts across the business

Strategic Technical Leadership

• Monitor the industry landscape, anticipate where messaging and data infrastructure are heading, and ensure Weave stays ahead of the curve
• Cut through noise and hype to identify genuine strategic value; advocate for and lead key initiatives that prepare Weave for emerging challenges
• Shape company-wide standards for engineering excellence, observability, and reliability in distributed systems

Mentorship & Organizational Capability

• Actively mentor Staff and Senior Engineers across the fellowship, developing the next generation of technical leaders
• Elevate architectural thinking across teams through design reviews, documentation standards, and hands-on guidance
• Build organizational capability that persists beyond your individual contributions

What You Will Need to Accomplish the Job

• 12+ years of software engineering experience with progressive technical leadership scope
• Track record of leading cross-team technical initiatives that delivered measurable business outcomes
• Demonstrated ability to influence without authority, build consensus across organizational boundaries, and translate technical tradeoffs into business terms
• Deep expertise in distributed systems architecture, including building and operating services that handle hundreds of millions of transactions and terabytes of data
• Proven experience with event streaming and messaging infrastructure (Kafka, Google Pub/Sub, or similar) at significant scale
• Strong background in scalable data stores—both relational (PostgreSQL at scale, Vitess, Spanner) and NoSQL (Bigtable, Redis, etc.)
• Operational experience with cloud-native infrastructure on GCP or AWS, including Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code, and highly available system design
• Solid backend engineering foundation (Go preferred; Python, Java, or C# acceptable)

What Will Make Us Love You

• Experience with messaging delivery systems, carrier/aggregator integrations, or telecommunications infrastructure
• Expertise in data platform architecture: streaming pipelines, data lakes, warehouses, or distributed analytics
• Background in compliance-heavy environments (healthcare, fintech) with experience navigating regulatory requirements in technical design
• Experience shaping AI/ML infrastructure or integrating AI capabilities into production systems
• History of external technical leadership: open source contributions, conference speaking, or published technical writing
• Strong opinions, loosely held—you bring conviction to technical discussions while remaining genuinely open to better ideas