Principal Engineer - Distributed Systems

Principal Engineer — Distributed Systems

Location: Seattle, WA — Hybrid, 2–4 days/week onsite
Compensation: $160,000–$200,000 base + up to 1% equity

What is the core job?

Own, operate, and improve a major vertical of a high-scale distributed infrastructure platform.

The platform runs large-scale services that execute significant query volumes, process substantial AI workloads, and ingest, transform, store, and retrieve large volumes of structured and unstructured data.

The difficult part is not simply adding capacity. Workloads vary enormously, with some customer workloads being orders of magnitude larger or more demanding than others while running on shared infrastructure. You will design systems that remain fair, isolated, observable, and predictable under contention.

This is an end-to-end ownership role. There is no separate platform, SRE, infrastructure, or database team responsible for finishing the work. When you design a system, you will also own its infrastructure definitions, deployment configuration, production promotion, observability, operational behavior, and incident response.

This is not primarily an architecture or advisory position. You will write production code, investigate performance and reliability problems, operate what you build, and establish technical patterns that other engineers can use.

Success means

• One customer’s workload cannot degrade another’s. Large jobs are isolated, admission is fair, and tail latency remains predictable under contention.
• Critical services have clear ownership, strong observability, understood failure modes, and reliable recovery paths.
• The system handles extreme variance in workload size, query patterns, ingestion volume, and processing demand without requiring manual intervention.
• Bottlenecks across ingestion, storage, retrieval, orchestration, and AI-processing pipelines are identified and removed.
• Infrastructure, application code, deployment configuration, and production operation are treated as one engineering responsibility rather than separate functions.
• The engineering team makes better architectural decisions because you contribute both technical leadership and working implementations.

Your background

You have built and operated high-volume, low-latency services on shared infrastructure.

Your experience may include:

• Distributed systems
• Workload isolation and multi-tenancy
• Admission control, queuing, scheduling, and backpressure
• Tail-latency management
• Reliability and failure recovery
• Large relational and NoSQL data stores
• Production infrastructure and deployment automation
• High-scale data processing or AI infrastructure
• Performance optimization and capacity management