Principal Engineer: System Architecture & Scale

remote work; United States; Remote; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Relocation support

Flexible work

Healthcare Coverage

Education Budget

Wellness Budget

Vacation Policy

Job summary

Unknown is seeking a Principal Engineer to scale the engineering organization, reduce system complexity, and define a sustainable technical direction on top of a mature platform.

You will operate at the system level, align architectural decisions across teams, lead RFCs and design reviews, and influence long‑term technical strategy with clear principles.

This role rewards thoughtful trade-offs, proactive risk management, and bold but thoughtful leadership in a high‑visibility environment.

Qualifications

• Experience in a large engineering organization (300+ engineers).
• Hands-on experience with complex distributed systems.
• Proven impact on architectural decisions beyond your own team.
• Experience with architectural mistakes, refactoring, and incidents.
• Strong system-level thinking and understanding of trade-offs.
• Clear communication and ability to work through disagreement.

Responsibilities

• Define and maintain company-wide architectural principles.
• Align technical decisions across teams and domains.
• Identify and reduce architectural and organizational complexity.
• Lead RFCs, architecture reviews, and design discussions.
• Influence technical decisions across the organization.
• Participate in major incident analysis and systemic problem solving.

Skills

System thinking

Distributed systems

Leadership

Architectural decisions

Job description

Unknown is seeking a Principal Engineer to scale the engineering organization, reduce system complexity, and define a sustainable technical direction on top of a mature platform.

You will operate at the system level, align architectural decisions across teams, lead RFCs and design reviews, and influence long‑term technical strategy with clear principles.

This role rewards thoughtful trade-offs, proactive risk management, and bold but thoughtful leadership in a high‑visibility environment.