Sr. Principal Engineer

Job summary

The Senior Principal Software Engineer is a hands‑on technical leader responsible for the architecture, design, and delivery of complex, highly available infrastructure platforms and related systems. This role operates across multiple teams and initiatives, setting technical direction, driving engineering best practices, and ensuring that our infrastructure is scalable, reliable, secure, and cost‑efficient.

What you will do

• Own the end‑to‑end architecture for cross‑functional initiatives on the DNS infrastructure platforms, including design, review, and guidance through implementation and rollout.
• Provide technical leadership and mentoring to DevOps Engineers, helping them make sound design decisions and improve design quality and operational excellence.
• Drive the evolution of the platform’s architecture (lead design, implementation, and evolution of infrastructure automation, monitoring, and system reliability practices), ensuring a continued commitment to providing 100% service availability. 
• Partner closely with functional partners; Product Management, Engineering, Support, Security and IT to ensure customer needs are met.  Resolve issues, shape technical roadmaps, identify dependencies, and de‑risk complex projects early.
• Anticipate and address systemic issues such as scalability bottlenecks, reliability gaps, and accumulated technical debt, and lead long‑term remediation efforts.
• Participate in on-call rotation as a senior escalation point for critical production incidents, guiding troubleshooting, root‑cause analysis, and follow‑up improvements.
• Evaluate and champion key technologies, tools, and frameworks aligned with our stack (e.g., Java/Go services, cloud infrastructure, DNS and networking components, CI/CD tooling) and drive their adoption through clear examples and documentation.
• Represent Infrastructure Engineering requirements in cross‑functional forums, architecture councils, and customer or partner discussions when deep technical context is required.
• Drive improvements in release management, incident management, capacity planning, and operational readiness.
• Own and improve standard operating procedures and system documentation.

What you will have

• Demonstrated expertise with CI/CD implementations (zero-touch provisioning), Cloud technologies (AWS preferred), DNS, Linux systems administration and performance tuning (CPU, memory, disk, network), networking fundamentals / BGP configuration, and the operation of high‑availability, latency‑sensitive services.
• Demonstrated ability to design and evolve complex systems, including clear articulation of trade‑offs around performance, reliability, security, and cost.
• Demonstrated ability to perform forensic system administration, troubleshooting unfamiliar Linux systems and services.
• Experience leading multi‑team initiatives, influencing without direct authority, and aligning stakeholders around a shared technical direction.
• Experience leading release management processes in highly available, globally distributed environments, preferably as a member of the change advisory board.
• Experience building and maintaining observability systems and developing custom dashboards to monitor key performance indicators.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to write clear design documents, present technical topics, and communicate effectively with both technical and non‑technical partners.
• Operates with a high sense of ownership for platform health, quality, and long‑term maintainability.
• Acts as a force multiplier by improving patterns, tooling, and practices that enable other engineers to deliver faster and safer.
• Models our engineering values: collaboration, transparency, data‑driven decision‑making, and continuous learning.
• Willingness and ability to learn new languages and technologies as needed by the business.
• Passion for operational excellence, security, and performance.

Nice to have

• Hands-on experience with AWS services (EC2, IAM, VPC, etc.) and provisioning tools like Terraform and Packer.
• Advanced proficiency in scripting and automation using Ansible, Bash, Python, Packer, and Terraform.
• Experience with datacenter operations including racking, stacking, and remote system management.
• Experience with Kentik, Splunk, or similar network visibility and observability platforms.

Benefits

• Generous time off policies
• Top shelf benefits
• Education, wellness and lifestyle support

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