Principal Engineer, Streaming Systems New York Office

Hightouch; New York (NY); Remote; USD 180,000 - 400,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity compensation

Remote-first policy

Job summary

Hightouch is seeking a principal engineer for the Streaming Systems team to lead high-throughput, low-latency data processing across billions of events. You will own end-to-end systems from ingestion to realtime computation for our Cursor for Marketers product.

You will mentor engineers, set technical direction, and spearhead greenfield platform work to sustain rapid scaling and reliability in a remote-first startup environment.

Qualifications

• Experience leading distributed systems at scale and delivering high-value outcomes.
• Ability to mentor engineers and influence technical direction.
• Strong background in designing low-latency, high-throughput data workflows.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end streaming platforms from ingestion to realtime processing.
• Lead architecture decisions to sustain throughput >1,000,000 messages/second with sub-second latency.
• Improve caching and deduplication strategies for online computation services.
• Drive zero-downtime deployment patterns and scalable deployment pipelines.

Skills

Distributed systems design

Leadership & mentoring

System design & architecture

Performance optimization

Real-time streaming

Job description

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 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.

#LI-DNP