Principal Engineer, Scalable & Secure AI-Enabled Platform

1Password LLC; United States; Remote; USD 246,000 - 369,000; Full time

Job summary

1Password is hiring a Principal Engineer to define the technical direction for core product experiences. You’ll shape architecture across client apps, distributed services, data platforms, and shared infrastructure, balancing security, reliability, and performance at scale.

You’ll drive engineering standards, guide AI-enabled capabilities, collaborate with Product, Design, Security, Privacy, and Infrastructure teams, and mentor engineers to raise the bar across the organization.

Qualifications

• Designed and operated large-scale distributed systems with reliability, scalability and operational excellence.
• Experience driving architecture across multiple teams,organizations, or product domains.
• Strong systems-thinking instincts and ability to reason about platform boundaries and long-term sustainability.
• Experience building customer-facing product systems across APIs, distributed services, cloud infrastructure and data platforms.
• Experience building or scaling event-driven systems, microservices, or shared platform infra in production.
• Experience integrating AI/ML capabilities into production applications and understanding engineering tradeoffs in AI-enabled trust-sensitive products.
• Strong privacy-preserving and security-conscious system design, including telemetry, user data, permissions, and auditability.
• Ability to drive alignment across teams with different incentives and perspectives.
• Clear communication with engineers, executives, and cross-functional partners; ability to explain complex tradeoffs.

Responsibilities

• Define architecture and technical direction for core product capabilities spanning clients, distributed services, data platforms, and shared infrastructure.
• Establish engineering standards and reusable architectural patterns for scalable, maintainable, and resilient product systems across Product Engineering.
• Drive long‑term technical strategy across critical product areas, balancing delivery, scalability, observability and platform sustainability.
• Partner with Product, Design, Security, Privacy, Infrastructure, and Data teams to ensure decisions support customer outcomes and durability.
• Guide how AI-powered capabilities are integrated into customer-facing product experiences, ensuring reliability, observability, operational safety and trust.
• Define engineering expectations for AI-enabled product systems, including evaluation frameworks, telemetry, rollout safety, and auditability.
• Establish shared platform capabilities and infrastructure patterns enabling cross-team development across clients, services, APIs and AI workflows.
• Influence decisions on distributed systems design, event-driven architectures, scalability, performance, and interoperability.
• Mentor engineers and raise the engineering bar through reviews, guidance and problem solving.
• Increase operational resilience through reliability practices and incident readiness.

Skills

Distributed systems

Architecture leadership

AI integration

Security by design

Privacy by design

Cross-functional collaboration

Communication skills

Mentoring engineers

Incident response

Observability

Tools

AWS

Kubernetes

CI/CD pipelines

Cloud platforms

Observability tools

Job description

1Password is hiring a Principal Engineer to define the technical direction for core product experiences. You’ll shape architecture across client apps, distributed services, data platforms, and shared infrastructure, balancing security, reliability, and performance at scale.

You’ll drive engineering standards, guide AI-enabled capabilities, collaborate with Product, Design, Security, Privacy, and Infrastructure teams, and mentor engineers to raise the bar across the organization.