Principal Software Engineer, Cloud Product Experience

Aerospike; Mountain View (CA); On-site; USD 260,000 - 320,000; Full time

Job summary

Aerospike is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to serve as technical authority for our Cloud Engineering organization. You will define the architectural vision and drive the execution of our global multi-cloud SaaS platform, enabling enterprises to deploy, operate, and scale Aerospike with extreme velocity and petabyte-scale workloads.

In this role, you will lead the design of cloud-native control and data planes, set engineering standards, mentor senior engineers, and partner with

Qualifications

• 10+ years designing and operating large-scale distributed systems and cloud platforms.

Responsibilities

• Set multi-year technical vision and architecture for a multi-cloud SaaS platform.
• Drive high availability, sub-millisecond performance, and seamless multi-tenancy.
• Define engineering standards for design, reliability, testing, and security across the org.
• Partner with executives and product leadership to translate complex enterprise needs into scalable platform capabilities.
• Mentor senior staff engineers and guide distributed teams through complex tradeoffs.
• Tackle performance, state management, orchestration, and topology challenges in real-time databases across hybrid/multi-cloud environments.
• Lead the design of cloud-native control planes, data planes, and microservice ecosystems.
• Design for extreme scale: auto-scaling, cross-region replication, and stateful workloads.
• Review critical designs and establish platform primitives and foundational code.
• Escalation point for architectural risks and outages.
• Influence ecosystem strategy including Kubernetes operators, IaC, and workflows.

Skills

Distributed systems

Go

Kubernetes

Multi-cloud

NoSQL internals

SLOs/SLIs

Architectural design

Leadership

Performance optimization

Distributed architecture

Tools

Kubernetes

Terraform

OpenTofu

OpenTelemetry

Prometheus

Grafana

Job description

We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer to serve as a technical authority and strategic architect for our Cloud Engineering organization. In this role, you will define the architectural vision and drive the execution of our next-generation, global multi-cloud SaaS platform.

Your work will fundamentally shape how global enterprises deploy, operate, and scale Aerospike at extreme velocity and petabyte scale-pushing the absolute limits of real-time, always-on distributed systems.

What You'll Do

• Architect at Enterprise Scale: Drive the multi-year technical vision, architecture, and roadmap for our multi-cloud SaaS platform, ensuring high availability, sub-millisecond efficiency, and seamless multi-tenancy.
• Establish Engineering Standards: Set the bar for system design, security, reliability, operational excellence, and testing across the entire engineering organization.
• Drive Technical Leadership & Strategy: Partner closely with executive stakeholders, product leadership, and principal architects to translate complex enterprise needs into scalable, resilient platform capabilities.
• Force Multiply: Mentor and elevate senior and staff engineers, foster a culture of deep technical rigor, and guide distributed teams through complex technical tradeoffs.
• Solve the Unsolved: Tackle the toughest performance, state management, orchestration, and topology challenges inherent in running real-time databases across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the architectural design and strategic execution of complex cloud-native control planes, data planes, and underlying microservice ecosystems.
• Design for extreme scale: optimize distributed runtime environments, auto-scaling mechanisms, cross-region replication, and stateful workload orchestration.
• Author critical platform primitives, framework standards, and foundational code while reviewing high-impact designs across teams.
• Serve as a primary escalation point for critical architectural risks, systemic performance bottlenecks, and high-severity platform outages.
• Influence platform ecosystem strategy, including Kubernetes operator patterns, infrastructure-as-code automation, and workflow orchestration.

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of hands-on experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems and cloud platforms.
• Proven Track Record: Experience acting in a Principal, Staff+, or Lead Architect capacity for a high-growth SaaS, IaaS, or database platform.
• Deep Distributed Systems Expertise: Mastery of fault tolerance, consensus protocols, multi-tenant isolation, data partitioning, and consistency models.
• Cloud-Native Systems Mastery: Deep expertise in Go (preferred) or other statically typed languages (Java, C++, Rust), alongside advanced Kubernetes internals and custom controller/operator development.
• Multi-Cloud Architecture: Deep production experience across major public clouds (AWS, GCP, Azure) at massive scale.
• Data & Storage Systems: Deep conceptual and practical understanding of NoSQL internals, access patterns, storage engine mechanics, and high-throughput data pipelines.
• Operational & Reliability Excellence: Experience establishing SLOs/SLIs, designing robust self-healing systems, and leading chaos engineering or incident post-mortem practices.

Preferred Qualifications

• Direct experience building Kubernetes Operators (e.g., Kubebuilder, Operator SDK) for stateful applications.
• Experience with orchestration engines like Temporal.
• Proficiency with Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, OpenTofu) and modern cloud-native observability stacks (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana).
• Prior experience in database-as-a-service (DBaaS), infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), or low-latency systems.
• Active contribution to relevant open-source projects in the cloud-native or distributed storage ecosystem.

Salary Range

$260,000 - $320,000

(Actual compensation will be based on experience, location, and other relevant factors.)

Aerospike is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to an environment free from discrimination based on race, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability, or veteran status.

To keep our recruitment pipeline as high-performance as our database, Aerospike uses AI-driven tools to streamline resume reviews, scheduling, and communication. While we love smart tech, we value human connection even more. AI helps us optimize the process, but real people make 100% of the actual hiring decisions.

Aerospike is the real-time database for mission-critical use cases and workloads, including machine learning, generative, and agentic AI. Aerospike powers millions of transactions per second with millisecond latency, at a fraction of the total cost of ownership compared to other databases.

Global leaders, including Adobe, Airtel, Barclays, Criteo, DBS Bank, Experian, Grab, HDFC Bank, PayPal, Sony Interactive Entertainment, The Trade Desk, and Wayfair, rely on Aerospike for customer 360, fraud detection, real-time bidding, profile stores, recommendation engines, and other use cases.

At Aerospike, we dream big and deliver even bigger. Our mission is unleash the power of the world's real-time data with a database built for infinite scale, speed, and sustainability.

If you're ready to shape the future of data, join us.