Principal Engineer

Relativity ODA LLC; United States; Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

Relativity ODA LLC is seeking an experienced engineer to design, build, and operate large-scale distributed systems with stringent availability targets. You will drive streaming-first processing, standardize architectural approaches, and mentor senior staff while hands-on in code and production systems.

You will influence engineering decisions and lead AI-assisted development practices across the Enrichment domain, partnering with executives to shape platform strategy.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of experience designing, building and operating complex cloud-native distributed systems.
• Experience delivering systems with 99.99% uptime and strict SLOs.
• Deep expertise in high-throughput data processing and scalable architectures.
• Experience with durable workflow/orchestration engines (e.g., Temporal) and container compute (Kubernetes).
• Strong reliability, performance, security, and observability foundations.
• Recognized authority in distributed systems architecture.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate always-on, secure distributed systems with high availability and throughput.
• Resolve complex cross-organizational technical problems through hands-on implementation.
• Define and lead the organization-wide technical vision and architecture.
• Establish enterprise standards for scalability, reliability, maintainability, security, and testing.
• Influence and align engineering execution with overall company strategy and culture.
• Lead evolution of Enrichment from batch to streaming-first pipelines delivering real-time results.
• Stay hands-on: code, review, and operate production software end-to-end.
• Drive agentic engineering practices and tooling for AI-assisted development.

Skills

12+ years experience

Cloud-native distributed systems

SLO-driven reliability

Temporal orchestration

Lead and mentor

Security and observability

Tools

Kubernetes

Temporal

Spark

Job description

Posting Type

Remote/Hybrid

Job Overview

We're looking for an engineer who designs, builds, and operates large-scale distributed systems under strict availability SLOs. Enrichment turns more than a petabyte a month of raw, unstructured data (files, mailboxes, drives, cloud containers) into structured legal intelligence, with jobs ranging from a few files to a billion. These systems require 99.99% uptime and sub-10-second job response, and when they're down or wrong, customers feel it immediately.

You’ll drive the shift from batch pipelines to streaming-first processing on Kubernetes, Spark, and Temporal, set technical standards, and raise the bar for the engineers around you. This is a hands‑on individual‑contributor role.

You’ll also mentor senior and staff engineers, set standards other teams adopt, influence across engineering and executives, and lead how the domain uses AI‑assisted and agentic development.

Job Description and Requirements

Who We Are

Relativity is a leading legal data intelligence company building technology that helps users organize data, discover the truth, and act on it with confidence. Our AI‑powered, cloud platform, RelativityOne, transforms massive volumes of complex information into actionable insights for litigation, investigations, regulatory inquiries, data breach responses, and other high‑stakes legal work where accuracy and trust are crucial.

The world's largest law firms, corporations and government agencies rely on Relativity's legal AI software to securely surface and manage the most relevant and impactful information in their matters. Beyond our commercial impact, we’re deeply committed to expanding access to technology for academic institutions through Relativity Academic and supporting pro bono legal work through Justice for Change.

What We Do

At Relativity, engineers don't just write code, they harness AI tools to architect, optimize, and deliver scalable software faster and shape the future of legal technology. They shape how industries uncover critical insights, ensure compliance, advance access to justice and continuously evolve our platform using the latest technologies, including cloud‑native architectures, AI capabilities, and modern developer tooling. Our AI powers privacy programs, identifies confidential information, and detects language indicating misconduct. We're reimagining how legal professionals uncover truth at scale, and engineering is at the heart of that transformation.

Job Description and Requirements

What You’ll Do

• Design, build, and operate always‑on, secure distributed systems with rigorous availability, throughput, and error SLOs that process more than a petabyte a month of unstructured data. Own how the systems behave under failure and load. Influence execution across engineering.
• Resolve the most complex, cross‑organizational technical problems through deep technical expertise, collaboration, and hands‑on implementation.
• Define and lead the organization‑wide technical vision and architecture and shape long‑term platform and data strategy.
• Establish enterprise standards for system scalability, reliability, maintainability, security, testability, and flexibility, partnering with teams to drive adoption.
• Influence and align engineering execution with company‑level strategy and shape engineering culture across the organization.
• Influence executive‑level product and platform decisions.
• Lead the evolution of Enrichment from primarily batch‑oriented jobs toward streaming‑first, continuously processing pipelines that deliver real‑time and large‑scale results (1K to 1B+ files), and write the code that proves the patterns out.
• Stay deeply hands‑on. Principals at Relativity aren’t ivory‑tower architects. They design, implement, review, and operate production software. You’ll be in the codebase, in the metrics, and owning systems end to end.
• Drive our agentic engineering push within Enrichment. Establish best practices, guardrails, and tooling for AI‑assisted and agentic development, and raise the bar for how the domain designs, tests, and ships software in an AI‑driven world.

What We’re Looking For

Required

• 12+ years of experience designing, building and operating complex cloud‑native distributed systems.
• Experience building and operating systems held to strict availability, latency, and throughput SLOs, including 99.99% uptime and error budgets, where customers feel it immediately when something is down or wrong.
• Deep expertise in high‑throughput data processing and transformation at scale, distributing work horizontally across a cluster: large batch pipelines, streaming/continuous systems, or both.
• Experience with durable workflow/orchestration engines (e.g., Temporal), event‑driven architectures, and container‑based compute (e.g., Kubernetes).
• Strong grounding in reliability, performance, security, and observability for services.
• Recognized authority in architecture and distributed systems.
• Experience defining organization‑wide technical standar