Principal Software Engineer

Job Requisition ID #

26WD97610

Position overview

We are building a large-scale, API-first streaming platform on Apache Flink, Apache Kafka, and AWS. The platform powers near-real-time ingestion, processing, and delivery of data for many internal and product-facing use cases. Everything is exposed and governed behind well-designed APIs, and teams consume capabilities through a self-serve portal as well as programmatic interfaces. We are hiring a Principal Engineer to own architecture and technical design for this platform: from stream topology and operational model to control-plane services, developer experience, and production excellence. This is a high-impact role with real architectural ownership - you will partner across product, platform, and data teams, mentor engineers, and raise the bar on reliability, security, and velocity.

 

Responsibilities

Architect and design the streaming platform

Define end-to-end architecture for stream processing: ingest, stateful processing, delivery, replay, and integration with downstream systems on Flink and Kafka

Design API-first boundaries (REST and event-driven patterns as appropriate) so streams, jobs, schemas, and operational workflows are manageable and safe at scale

Shape multi-tenant or multi-team patterns: quotas, isolation, naming, observability, and upgrade strategies for long-running Flink workloads

Evolve AWS-native deployment and operations (networking, IAM, scaling, resilience patterns) aligned with organizational security and compliance requirements

Build and evolve platform surfaces

Lead design of Spring Boot-based services that implement the platform control plane, metadata, orchestration hooks, and integration with Kafka/Flink operations

Contribute to the self-serve portal and related UX: work with product and design and apply solid frontend engineering practices so internal users can onboard, configure, and operate without excessive manual support

Drive developer experience: documentation, SDKs or clients where applicable, golden paths, and reducing time-to-first-successful pipeline

Engineer for scale, reliability, and cost

Define and refine SLIs/SLOs, capacity planning, backpressure handling, and failure modes for streaming workloads

Institutionalize testing (unit, integration, contract, load) and progressive delivery for streaming jobs and services

Champion observability: metrics, tracing, structured logging, and actionable alerting for Kafka, Flink, and surrounding services

CI/CD, infrastructure, and operations

Own and improve CI/CD pipelines for application code, infrastructure, and safe promotion of Flink jobs and configuration

Partner on Infrastructure as Code, environment strategy, and operational runbooks; participate in on-call or operational escalation as appropriate for a principal (you build it, you run it mindset)

Lead technically and collaborate

Translate ambiguous requirements into clear technical strategies, RFCs, and phased execution plans

Mentor engineers, lead architecture and code reviews, and align teams on standards for Java, APIs, streaming, and AWS usage

Work with security, networking, and platform teams on secure-by-design streaming and API patterns

 

What success looks like

A clear, documented architecture for the streaming platform that teams can adopt without heroics

Reliable, observable Kafka and Flink estates with predictable scaling and incident response

APIs and self-serve flows that reduce tickets, manual operations, and time-to-production for stream owners

Stronger engineering practices - CI/CD, testing, reviews - and a more capable team around you

 

Minimum qualifications

10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including deep hands-on ownership of distributed systems in production

Expert-level experience with Apache Kafka (topics, partitioning, consumer groups, reliability, operations) and Apache Flink (state, checkpoints, rescaling, fault tolerance, performance tuning)

sustained production ownership, not occasional use

Strong proficiency in Java as the primary language for large, maintainable systems

Demonstrated experience with Spring Boot (or equivalent JVM microservices frameworks) building production APIs and services

Hands-on AWS experience designing and operating services (compute, networking, IAM, observability patterns; familiarity with Kubernetes or managed container/orchestration patterns where the platform runs)

Proven CI/CD experience (pipeline design, artifact promotion, testing gates) and infrastructure management (IaC concepts, environments, drift, operational change)

Experience shipping user-facing or internal portals or significant full-stack contributions - enough to partner credibly with frontend specialists and own end-to-end delivery for self-serve workflows

Excellent communication skills; ability to drive consensus across engineering, product, and operations

Preferred qualifications

Experience building or operating a streaming/data platform used by many teams (not a single standalone pipeline)

Familiarity with schema governance, serialization formats, and compatibility across producers and consumers

Experience with AWS managed streaming or related services (e.g., MSK, Kinesis) where relevant to hybrid architectures

Background in observability stacks tailored to Kafka and Flink

Contributions to technical standards, guilds, or cross-org architecture forums

The Ideal Candidate

You are a builder and systems thinker: you care about clean abstractions, thoughtful APIs, and operable designs

You are comfortable with ambiguity and turn it into architecture, milestones, and measurable outcomes

You balance velocity with sustainability - performance, security, and long-term maintainability matter as much as shipping

 

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