Principal Engineer, Streaming Systems

Hightouch; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 320,000; Full time

Job summary

Hightouch is seeking a Principal Engineer for its Streaming Systems team to lead the development of high-throughput systems that handle billions of behavioral events in real-time. The ideal candidate will have a deep understanding of distributed systems and a passion for mentoring engineers in a fast-paced, startup environment. The role offers a competitive salary range of $180,000 – $320,000 per year, with equity compensation and a remote-first policy.

Qualifications

• Experience architecting, building, deploying, and maintaining distributed systems at scale.
• Passion for solving hard technical problems and mentoring engineers.
• Comfortable in a fast-paced, startup environment.

Responsibilities

• Lead work on high-throughput systems that process billions of behavioral events.
• Ensure <1s end-to-end system latency while sustaining throughput over 1,000,000 messages per second.
• Own and deliver projects from start to finish while working directly with customers.

Skills

Distributed systems

High throughput architecture

Message deduplication

Real-time computation

Mentoring

Job description

About Hightouch

Hightouch is the modern AI platform for marketing and growth teams. Our AI agents reimagine marketing workflows, allowing marketers to create content, plan campaigns, and execute strategies with transformational velocity and performance.

Hightouch is a rare company built on the intersection of two fundamental technological shifts: advances in LLMs and agentic AI, and the rapid adoption of cloud data warehouses like Snowflake and Databricks. Building on these tailwinds, we’ve become a leader in AI marketing and partner with industry leaders such as Domino’s, Chime, Spotify, Ramp, Whoop, Grammarly, and over 1000 others.

Our team focuses on delivering meaningful impact for our customers. We approach challenges with first‑principles thinking, move quickly and efficiently, and treat each other with compassion and kindness. We look for team members who are strong communicators, have a growth mindset, and are motivated and persistent in achieving our goals.

About The Role

We are looking for a principal engineer to join our Streaming Systems team. This role will lead work on high‑throughput systems that collect, forward, and perform real‑time computation on billions of behavioral events from our customers’ users. You’ll build the infrastructure that ingests clickstream, product interaction, and transactional data into our platform. This data fuels our “Cursor for Marketers” AI agent product.

Our streaming products’ revenue has increased tenfold over the past year, demanding continued scaling. The infrastructure must handle millions of messages per second with single‑second end‑to‑end latency. We recently added a computation engine that enables real‑time personalization based on live behavior; the first few months have seen seven‑figure market response, and we need to scale to meet demand.

• Preserve <1s end‑to‑end system latency while sustaining throughput over 1,000,000 messages per second.
• Improve caching strategies for our online computation service.
• Architect a system that can deduplicate message delivery at 1,000,000 messages per second.
• Design patterns for elegant and zero‑downtime deployments in our online computation service.

We believe in enabling our engineers to do their best work by granting 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.

Base salary range: $180,000 – $320,000 USD per year, location independent in accordance with our remote‑first policy. A large portion of compensation will be in equity via ISO options, with early exercise and a 10‑year post‑termination exercise window.

About You

• You are an experienced engineer passionate about 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.

E-Verify Statement

Hightouch participates in E‑Verify. We will provide the Social Security Administration, and if necessary, the Department of Homeland Security, with information from each new employee’s Form I‑9 to confirm work authorization. Please note that we do not use this information to pre‑screen job applicants.