Principal Engineer, Streaming Systems

Rozgoo; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Hightouch is seeking a principal engineer to lead the Streaming Systems team, building high-throughput, low-latency infrastructure that ingests billions of events for the Cursor for Marketers AI product. You will help design and scale systems that process clickstream, product interaction, and transactional data in real time.

The role emphasizes greenfield development and leading other engineers, with a focus on preserving sub-second latency and zero-downtime deployments as the platform scales.

Qualifications

• Experience leading engineers on greenfield projects.
• Ability to preserve sub-second latency at high throughput.
• Experience with scalable online computation services and real-time personalization.

Responsibilities

• Preserving <1s end to end system latency at throughput over 1,000,000 messages / second.
• Improving caching strategies for our online computation service.
• Architecting a system that can deduplicate message delivery at 1,000,000 messages / second.
• Patterns for elegant and zero-downtime deployments in our online computation service.

Skills

Principal engineer

Streaming systems

Real-time processing

High throughput

Low latency

Job description

About Hightouch

Hightouch is an Agentic Marketing Platform powered by the industry-leading Composable CDP. With complete brand context, customer data, and performance history in one place, every marketer finally has the power to build and ship end-to-end campaigns themselves. Teams move faster, stay on brand, and get AI marketing that actually works.

Founded in 2019 and headquartered in San Francisco, Hightouch enables marketing teams to analyze performance, brainstorm ideas, and generate creative at a speed and quality that wasn't previously possible.

Named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Customer Data Platforms, Hightouch is trusted by leading enterprises like Domino's, Spotify, Aritzia, Cars.com, Ramp, and PetSmart.

At Hightouch, our mission is to help our customers leverage data and AI to grow their businesses. The team is ambitious, impact-driven, efficient — and we believe humility, kindness, and compassion are essential to our success. If you're energized by velocity, obsessed with raising the bar, and want to build alongside people who care deeply about each other and our customers, we'd love to meet you.

About the Role

We are looking for a principal engineer to join our Streaming Systems team, leading work on the high-throughput systems that collect, forward, and perform realtime computation on billions of behavioral events from our customer’s users. You'll be building the infrastructure that ingests clickstream, product interaction, and transactional data into our platform. This data is the platform for our “Cursor for Marketers” AI agent product.

Our streaming products’ revenue has 10x’d over the past year, and we need to ensure that we continue to scale. Our infrastructure needs to handle millions of messages per second at single second latency end to end. Recently, we added a computation engine that allows personalizing user experiences in real-time based on live behavior; we’re seeing 7-figure market response in the first few months and need to scale up to meet demand.

We are building new products from scratch, so we need someone who enjoys greenfield work and leading other engineers. Some of the problems you’d work on include:

1. Preserving <1s end to end system latency at throughput over 1,000,000 messages / second.
2. Improving caching strategies for our online computation service
3. Architecting a system that can deduplicate message delivery at 1,000,000 messages / second.
4. Patterns for elegant and zero-downtime deployments in our online computation service

We believe in enabling our engineers to do their best work for our cust