Principal Engineer, Streaming Systems

Hightouch; San Francisco (CA); Remote; USD 180,000 - 400,000; Full time

Job summary

Hightouch, a remote‑first marketing platform based in San Francisco, seeks a principal engineer for the Streaming Systems team to own and advance high‑throughput, real‑time data infrastructure that ingests billions of events per second.

You will lead greenfield work, mentor engineers, and drive architectural decisions to scale our Cursor for Marketers AI product and ensure sub‑second latency at scale.

Qualifications

• Experience architecting, building, deploying, and maintaining distributed systems at scale.
• Strong ownership mindset with ability to mentor and up‑level engineers.

Responsibilities

• Lead high‑throughput streaming infrastructure ingesting clickstream, product interaction, and event data.
• Preserve sub‑1s end‑to‑end latency at >1,000,000 messages/second.
• Architect zero‑downtime deployments and scalable caching strategies for live computation services.

Skills

Distributed systems

System design

High throughput

Mentoring engineers

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.

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

• 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

We believe in enabling our engineers to do their best work for our customers by giving them extremely high levels of ownership and autonomy. You will own and deliver projects from start to finish, work directly with customers to solve their hardest scaling problems, and have significant influence over our technical roadmap.

The base salary range for this position is $180,000 - $400,000 USD per year, which is location independent in accordance with our remote-first policy. We also offer meaningful equity compensation.

About You

• You are an experienced engineer with a passion for solving hard technical problems that generate real value for customers. You’re motivated by high ownership and are comfortable in a fast-paced, startup environment. You have experience leading highly complex and ambitious projects, and want to mentor and up level engineers around you.
• You have experience architecting, building, deploying, and maintaining distributed systems at scale, and can broadcast and encourage technical excellence in doing so.
• You have opinions about how engineering should be done, and want to help scale a rapidly growing engineering team.

Interview Process

Our goal with the interview process is to balance speed with giving both parties opportunities to assess whether there is a strong mutual fit. We will ask you questions, but we want you to ask us questions! Our technical interviews focus on how you design systems because we believe this is the best way for us to see how you work and for you to see how we collaborate. We don’t ask you to write code to solve technical brainteasers that don’t appear in your day to day job.

• Recruiter Screen [30m]: Introductory call with our recruiting team to get to know each other and see if the role could be a good mutual fit.
• System Design Screen [45m]: Designing a data processing feature end-to-end.
• Hiring Manager Interview [30m]: Chat with hiring manager about past experiences and future operating preferences to assess fit on company values and operating principles.
• System Design Interview [90m]: Work with the interviewer to architect a system at a conceptual level. The problem will be at a pretty high level - and have both product and customer requirements as well as technical.
• Execution and Impact [60m]: Pick a project you lead and prepare to give the interviewer a walk through. Then deep dive and answer questions about the project execution and how you lead it.