Principal Engineer
Principal Engineer owning multi-year technical vision and architecture for Weave's Payments, Scheduling, and RCM platforms. Lead cross-team strategy, mentorship, and distributed systems at scale (15+ years experience required).
About the job
What You Will Own
Technical Strategy & Architecture
- Own the multi-year technical vision for Payments, Scheduling, Forms, Business Experience and RCM application platforms, 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 high-scale customer experience and transactional platforms 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
- 15+ 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
- 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.
- Expertise in data platform architecture: streaming pipelines, data lakes, warehouses, or distributed analytics.
Skills
Distributed Systems, Event Streaming, Kafka, Google Pub/Sub, Postgres, Vitess, Spanner, Bigtable, Redis, Kubernetes, GCP, AWS, Go, Python, Java
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