# Principal Engineer

**Company:** [Weave](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/weave)
**Location:** Remote
**Role:** Engineering Management
**Experience:** 12+ years
**Skills:** Go, Python, Java, C#, Kafka, Google Pub/Sub, Postgres, Vitess, Spanner, Bigtable, Redis, Kubernetes, GCP, AWS, Distributed Systems
**Posted:** 2026-03-30

> Leads technical strategy and architecture for high-scale messaging infrastructure handling millions of messages, drives cross-team initiatives, and mentors senior engineers. Requires 12+ years experience in distributed systems, event streaming, and cloud-native backend engineering.

## Job Description

## 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

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