Principal Software Engineer: Distributed Systems (Config, Test, & Deployment)

United States Digital Space LLC

United States

Hybrid

USD 200,000 - 288,000

Full time

14 days+

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Benefits offered by this job

Equity participation

Comprehensive health insurance

Flexible paid time off

Job summary

United States Digital Space LLC is seeking a senior engineer for the Intent Management team to ensure safe change within their platform. You will work with a globally distributed technical platform, reporting directly to senior leadership and influencing teams.

The ideal candidate will have over 10 years in software engineering, proven technical leadership, and expertise in modern programming languages and system design. Exceptional benefits and competitive compensation package available, adjusted per location.

Qualifications

10+ years of software engineering experience successfully leading complex initiatives.
Strong track record of technical leadership and influencing teams.
Expert in at least one modern strongly-typed programming language.

Responsibilities

Own the technical coherence of a globally distributed platform.
Work alongside senior engineers on impactful health-mediation projects.
Translate platform needs into actionable engineering tasks.

Skills

Software engineering experience

Technical leadership

API design standards

Experience with LLMs

Tools

Kubernetes

RocksDB or similar data stores

Job description

About Us

At the company, we are on a mission to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the world’s largest networks that powers millions of websites and other Internet properties for customers ranging from individual bloggers to SMBs to Fortune 500 companies. the company protects and accelerates any Internet application online without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code. Internet properties powered by the company all have web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which gets smarter with every request. As a result, they see significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks. the company was named to Entrepreneur Magazine’s Top Company Cultures list and ranked among the World’s Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company.

At the company, we’re not looking for people who wait for a polished roadmap; we’re looking for the builders who see the cracks in the Internet that everyone else has simply learned to live with. We value candidates who have the instinct to spot a "normalized" problem and the AI-native curiosity to create a solution using the latest tools. Our culture is built on iteration, leveraging AI to ship faster today to make it better tomorrow, while ensuring that every improvement, no matter how small, is shared across the team to lift everyone up. If you’re the type of person who values curiosity over bureaucracy, and that AI is a partner in solving tough problems to keep the Internet moving forward, you’ll fit right in.

Available Locations: Washington DC, Austin, NYC, San Francisco

About the Dept

the company’s engineers build and operate the software that helps power 25+ million Internet properties and millions of businesses around the world. Across our engineering organizations, we have opportunities for high caliber, curious and empathetic people to take on big challenges and build some of the best skills in the industry. We’re looking for talented team members to help build high-growth products, help scale our expanding network, build tools to improve availability, performance, uptime, and response times, and make systems failure-resistant and ready-to-scale.

the company is a fast growing company and engineering is an ever-evolving function with teams being formed and redefined often. You will interview for an engineering role in the Intent Management organization which is part of the overall Foundational Engineering team at the company, which builds and operates many of the fundamental systems powering the company’s products.

What you'll do

Too many of the company's most impactful incidents have had unsafe change as a root cause. The Intent Management exists to make safe change the easy button and this is the most senior IC role in that organization, reporting directly to the Senior Director. You will own the technical coherence of a platform that spans globally distributed key-value storage, progressive release and configuration delivery, and the testing and health-mediation systems that prove change is safe. You'll work at the seams that matter most by translating what the company's Edge and control-plane platforms need into the primitives our teams build. You'll move fluidly between writing production code, designing new systems, and reviewing the proposals of other senior engineers. You’ll also help us work out how best to integrate LLMs into our processes and systems.

You will be working alongside engineers who have presented at DevOps Days, Config Management Camp 2024 & 2025, Monitorama, OSMC, KubeCon and PromCon. Together you will deliver on the key Health Mediated Deployment projects that are being tracked through senior leadership of the company up to the founders.

Examples of desirable skills, knowledge and experience

10+ years of software engineering experience with a demonstrated history of leading complex, organization-wide technical initiatives that delivered measurable improvements to system performance, reliability, security, developer productivity, or engineering culture.
Strong track record of technical leadership and influence without direct authority, including driving consensus on technical decisions across multiple teams, mentoring senior engineers, and establishing architectural patterns that are widely adopted across an organization.

Experience designing, building and managing high volume, global scale software applications.
Expert in at least one modern strongly-typed programming language
Knowledge of API design standards, patterns and best practices
Experience working with top tier LLMs to plan, write, test, and deploy software

Bonus Points

Strong interpersonal and communication skills with a bias towards action
Experience with scaling and simplifying high scale Configuration Management systems
Familiarity with Google’s Prodspec and Annealing systems
Experience with Kubernetes
Experience with RocksDB or similar data stores
Experience with health checking and probe platforms at significant scale
Public evidence of technical leadership such as conference talks on distributed systems or security, widely-read technical blog posts, significant open source contributions, or published architectural patterns that have been adopted by the broader engineering community.

Compensation

Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.

For Bay Area based hires: Estimated annual salary of $230,000 - $288,000
For Washington and New York City based hired: Estimated annual salary of $220,000 - $275,000
For Austin based hired: Estimated annual salary of $200,000 - $250,000

Equity

This role is eligible to participate in the company’s equity plan.

Benefits

the company offers a complete package of benefits and programs to support you and your family. Our benefits programs can help you pay health care expenses, support caregiving, build capital for the future and make life a little easier and fun! The below is a description of our benefits for employees in the United States, and benefits may vary for employees based outside the U.S.

Health & Welfare Benefits