Principal Software Engineer: Cloud Architecture & SRE Lead

Akamai; United States; Hybrid; USD 169,000 - 305,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare benefits

401K savings plan

Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP)

Parental leave

Job summary

Akamai is seeking a Principal Software Engineer Lead to architect scalable distributed systems, drive reliability and innovate across core compute interfaces and automation platforms.

You will lead design reviews, establish standards, mentor teams, and own deployment safety pipelines with CI/CD and automated testing. This role requires leadership in SRE and a strong track record of architectural excellence.

Qualifications

• 12 years of relevant experience and a Bachelor's degree.
• Experience developing full-stack web applications, APIs, and microservices in Linux or Unix environments.
• Expertise in languages such as Python, JavaScript, SQL, Ruby, or PHP.
• Knowledge of CI/CD pipelines, containerization, automated testing, and revision control workflows.
• SRE principles including SLI/SLO tracking, toil reduction, and root-cause analysis.
• Experience creating architectural blueprints, evaluating emerging technologies, and mentoring peers.
• US Citizenship and be eligible for security clearance; active clearance not required.

Responsibilities

• Architect complex distributed software systems and author technical blueprints to reduce toil.
• Establish development standards, PR review frameworks, and SLOs for resilience.
• Design deployment safety pipelines, CI workflows, and automated testing for production releases.
• Serve as Tier-3 escalation authority for complex failures and lead postmortems.
• Mentor engineering teams on system design and foster a collaborative culture.

Skills

Full-stack apps

APIs & microservices

Linux/Unix

CI/CD

SRE principles

Mentoring

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

Python

JavaScript

SQL

Ruby

PHP

Job description

Akamai is seeking a Principal Software Engineer Lead to architect scalable distributed systems, drive reliability and innovate across core compute interfaces and automation platforms.

You will lead design reviews, establish standards, mentor teams, and own deployment safety pipelines with CI/CD and automated testing. This role requires leadership in SRE and a strong track record of architectural excellence.