Principal Platform Engineer – Distributed Systems Leader

Medidata Solutions, Inc.; Woodbridge Township (NJ); Hybrid; USD 165,000 - 220,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

Dental insurance

Life insurance

Disability insurance

401(k) matching

Family leave

Flexible paid time off

10 paid holidays

Job summary

Medidata seeks an experienced Principal Software Engineer to drive the next generation of Medidata's software applications. In a hybrid role based in NJ/NY, you will architect scalable systems and lead cross-functional teams to deliver enterprise-grade products with consumer-grade experiences.

You will mentor senior staff, advance SRE practices, and guide AI/ML experimentation toward production stability while balancing security, cost, and performance considerations.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, incl. staff/principal level
• Experience leading multi-team technical initiatives delivering measurable value
• Proven ability to communicate strategy to executives and mentor senior engineers
• Strong background in distributed systems, fault-tolerance, and high-throughput designs

Responsibilities

• Direct long-term technical evolution and architectural strategy for Study Experience
• Architect and deploy distributed, high-availability environments
• Coordinate cross-team engineering work and clarify requirements
• Define engineering benchmarks and shared infrastructure patterns
• Oversee architectural decisions and RFC/ADR documentation
• Lead R&D and transition AI/ML capabilities to production
• Translate business goals into technical roadmaps for execs
• Mentor senior engineers and foster design philosophy
• Implement SLOs, observability standards, and cost optimization

Skills

Distributed systems

Multi-region deployments

Leadership & mentoring

Security & zero-trust

CI/CD & release engineering

Observability & SRE practices

Education

Advanced degree in Computer Science or related field

12+ years software engineering

Staff/Principal level experience

Tools

AWS (EKS, Lambda, DynamoDB, Aurora)

Docker

Kubernetes

REST/GraphQL/gRPC

Terraform/CDK

Job description

Medidata seeks an experienced Principal Software Engineer to drive the next generation of Medidata's software applications. In a hybrid role based in NJ/NY, you will architect scalable systems and lead cross-functional teams to deliver enterprise-grade products with consumer-grade experiences.

You will mentor senior staff, advance SRE practices, and guide AI/ML experimentation toward production stability while balancing security, cost, and performance considerations.