Principal Engineer

Relativity; United States; Hybrid; USD 210,000 - 314,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Home office stipend

DTO (Discretionary Time Off)

Equity program

Health and retirement programs

Job summary

Relativity is seeking a seasoned technical leader to design and scale cloud-native, distributed systems that process petabytes of data weekly. You will shape enterprise-wide standards, security, and reliability strategies, while mentoring teams and influencing senior stakeholders.

The role emphasizes streaming-first workflows, AI-assisted development, and hands-on ownership of production systems across a highly collaborative environment.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of experience designing, building and operating complex cloud-native distributed systems.
• Recognized authority in architecture and distributed systems.
• Experience defining organization-wide technical standards.
• Deep involvement in security, compliance, and reliability strategy.
• Ability to align technical vision with company-level strategy.
• Proven influence at senior and executive levels.
• Exceptional mentorship, communication, and strategic thinking skills.
• Deep expertise in high-throughput data processing and transformation at scale.

Responsibilities

• Drive the design and architecture of distributed, scalable, secure full-stack cloud services that process petabytes of data weekly. 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 batch-oriented pipelines toward streaming-first, continually processing workflows delivering real-time, large-scale results.
• Stay deeply hands-on; own production software end-to-end.

Skills

Cloud-native distributed systems

Architectural leadership

Security and reliability strategy

High-throughput data processing

Event-driven architectures

Kubernetes

Temporal or durable workflows

AI-assisted engineering mindset

Executive stakeholder influence

Mentorship and communication

Tools

Temporal

Kubernetes

Event Hub / Kafka

Apache Spark

Job description

_ Posting Type _

Remote/Hybrid

_ Job Overview _

ABOUT THE ROLE

We’re seeking a seasoned technical leader with deep expertise in building and scaling complex, cloud-native distributed systems. This individual is a recognized authority in architecture, with a proven track record of shaping organization-wide technical standards, driving security and reliability strategies, and influencing senior stakeholders. You’ll bring strong experience in high-throughput data systems, event-driven architectures, and modern orchestration frameworks, along with the ability to align technical vision to broader business strategy. Beyond technical excellence, you’re a strategic thinker and mentor who elevates teams, champions best practices—including emerging AI-assisted development—and thrives in high-impact, highly collaborative environments.

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,corporationsand 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’redeeply committed to expanding access to technology for academic institutions throughRelativity Academicand supporting pro bono legal work throughJustice for Change.

What We Do

At Relativity, engineersdon’tjust 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,identifiesconfidential information, and detects languageindicatingmisconduct.We’rereimagining how legal professionals uncover truth at scale, and engineering is at the heart of that transformation.

WhatYou’llDo

• Drive the design and architecture of distributed, scalable, secure full-stack cloud services that process petabytes of data weekly. Influence execution across engineering.

• Resolve the most complex, cross-organizational technical problems through deep technicalexpertise, collaboration, and hands-on implementation.

• Define and lead the organization-wide technical vision and architecture and shape long-termplatformand 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 pipelines toward streaming-first, continuously processing workflows**that deliver real-time and large-scale results (1Kto 1B+ files) — and write the code that proves the patterns out.

• Stay deeply hands-on. Principals at Relativityareivory-tower architects — they design, implement, review, andoperateproduction software.You’llbe in the codebase, in the metrics, and on call for the hardestproblems,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.

WhatWe’reLooking For

• 12+years of experience designing,buildingandoperatingcomplex cloud-native distributed systems.

• Recognized authority in architecture and distributed systems.

• Experience defining organization-wide technical standards.

• Deep involvement in security, compliance, and reliability strategy.

• Abilityto align technical vision with company-level strategy.

• Proven influence at senior and executive levels.

• Exceptional mentorship, communication, and strategic thinking skills.

• Deepexpertisein high-throughput data processing and transformation at scale — large batch pipelines, streaming/continuous systems, or both.

• Experience with durable workflow/orchestration engines (e.g., Temporal), event-driven architectures, and container-basedcompute(e.g., Kubernetes).

• Strong grounding in reliability, performance, security, and observability for systems running under strict SLOs.

Preferred

• Experience guiding enterprise UI/UX, system or data architecture.

• Background in legal tech, AI-enabled platforms, or regulated domains.

• External thought leadership or industry contribution.

• Familiarity with AI-development tools like GitHub Copilot, Cursor or Claude Code.

• Hands-on experience designing or scaling streaming / continuous data-processing systems (e.g., Event Hub, Kafka, Apache Spark, or similar stream-processing frameworks).

• Demonstrated leadership in adopting agentic and AI-assisted engineering workflows (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or Claude Code) andestablishingteam best practices and guardrails.

Why We Could BeAGreat Fit

• Impactful Mission: Organize Data, Discover the Truth and Act on It - Our customers include Fortune 500 enterprises and leading law firms managing high-stakes matters on our platform.

• Growth Path: Engineers gain exposure across the stack, from distributed systems to AI-enabled workflows, accelerating career growth.

• Engineering Culture: Continuous delivery, strong observability, and end-to-end ownership.

• Inclusive Environment: Diverse backgrounds and perspectives make us stronger.

• Community Impact: Volunteer opportunities and company-sponsored charitable programs.

• Compensation & Benefits: Competitive salary, health and retirement programs, wellnessresources, discretionary time off (DTO), parental leave for primary and secondary caregivers,two annual company breaks, home office stipend, and an equity program.

Relativity is committed to competitive, fair, and equitable compensation practices.

This position is eligible for total compensation which includes a competitive base salary, an annual performance bonus, and long-term incentives.

The expected salary range for this role is between following values:

$210,000 and $314,000

The final offered salary will be based on several factors, including but not limited to the candidate’s depth of experience, skill set, qualifications, and internal pay equity. Hiring at the top end of the range would not be typical, to allow for future meaningful salary growth in this position.

Required Skills:

Agile Methodology, Algorithms, Automation, Big Data Processing, Distributed Systems, Mentorship, Problem Solving, Software Architectures, Strategic Planning, System Designs, Technical Leadership