Principal Software Engineer

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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