Principal Platform Billing Engineer — Scale & Reliability

Referral Board; United States; On-site; USD 160,000 - 253,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage for you and family

Flexible locations and schedules

Generous vacation days

Employer 401k matching up to 6%

Volunteer time off (40 hours/year)

Parental leave improvement

Job summary

Elastic is seeking a Principal Software Engineer I for the Billing Core to drive technical direction and own complex billing systems across cloud providers. This hands-on role focuses on data pipelines, system reliability, and scalable architectures.

You will mentor engineers and collaborate with Product, SRE, and Finance to align roadmaps with business goals. The role emphasizes strong Python and PostgreSQL skills, cloud infrastructure expertise, and experience with SaaS billing.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in backend or platform engineering with Python and PostgreSQL (schema design, performance, high availability).
• Proven experience improving reliability, observability, and incident response in production systems.
• Cloud infrastructure experience across AWS, GCP, or Azure including networking, IAM, monitoring, and deployment.
• Ability to lead multi-quarter projects across teams—building consensus and delivering results.
• Track record of mentoring engineers, setting technical direction, and raising engineering standards.
• Experience with SaaS billing, metering, or financial systems is a real plus.
• Clear written and verbal communication skills; able to influence across teams and with non-technical partners.
• Comfortable in a distributed, async environment and across projects/teams.

Responsibilities

• Own complex billing and account management systems across multiple services and cloud providers.
• Build large-scale data pipelines for billing data ingestion, transformation, and reconciliation.
• Improve observability, incident response, and reliability of core billing systems using modern DevOps practices.
• Shape system architecture for scale and modularity; guide service design, API structure, and data modelling.
• Collaborate with SRE and Cloud teams to enhance deployment, monitoring, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Own PostgreSQL data architecture and performance; focus on query speed, schema quality, and high availability.
• Be the go-to technical reviewer for the billing core stack and maintain consistency and quality.
• Mentor engineers across Billing to raise design and operational standards.
• Coordinate with Product, Design, and Finance to set feasible roadmaps aligned with business goals.
• Participate in on-call rotations to ensure production readiness through automation and resilience testing.

Skills

Python

PostgreSQL

Backend engineering

Cloud infrastructure

Observability & incident response

Leadership & mentoring

SaaS billing / metering

Communication

DoD IL4 eligibility

Job description

Elastic is seeking a Principal Software Engineer I for the Billing Core to drive technical direction and own complex billing systems across cloud providers. This hands-on role focuses on data pipelines, system reliability, and scalable architectures.

You will mentor engineers and collaborate with Product, SRE, and Finance to align roadmaps with business goals. The role emphasizes strong Python and PostgreSQL skills, cloud infrastructure expertise, and experience with SaaS billing.