Principal Software Engineer, Platform

NRG Energy; Washington; Hybrid; USD 225,000 - 285,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Paid holidays

Medical/dental/vision

401(k) + Employer Match

Job summary

Vivint Smart Home is seeking a Principal Platform Engineer to set the technical direction for cloud services, event pipelines, APIs, and IoT integrations powering millions of connected homes. This senior individual-contributor role will own architecture across teams in Seattle, solving hard problems hands-on and shaping the engineering culture.

You will mentor senior engineers, drive build-vs-buy decisions, and partner with Product and Security to align the roadmap with business priorities.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in CS or related field or equivalent experience.
• 10+ years building and operating production systems with staff-level experience.
• Expert in Go, Python or Java and large-scale distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• Define multi-year architecture for core platform services and APIs.
• Lead design of high-scale, low-latency systems processing real-time events.
• Set reliability, security, observability, and operability standards with SLOs.
• Stay hands-on with prototypes and incident resolution; mentor engineers.

Skills

Go

Python

Java

Distributed systems

Cloud-native

Education

Bachelor’s degree in CS or related field

Tools

Kubernetes

CI/CD

AWS/GCP

Datadog/OpenTelemetry

Job description

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Welcome to the intersection of energy and home services. At NRG, we’re driven by our passion to create a smarter, cleaner and more connected future.

Vivint Smart Home, an NRG owned company, is a leading smart home company in the United States, dedicated to redefining the home experience with intelligent products and services. We find purpose in proactively protecting and keeping our customers connected to home, no matter where they are. Join the Smart Home team to create smarter, safer and more sustainable homes.

About This Role

We are seeking a Principal Platform Engineer to set technical direction for Vivint's core platform: the cloud services, event pipelines, APIs, and IoT integrations that power millions of connected homes. This is a senior individual-contributor role. You will own architecture across multiple teams, lead the hardest technical problems hands-on, and raise the engineering bar for a growing Seattle team. In this role, you will be responsible to:

• Define the technical strategy and multi-year architecture for core platform services, event pipelines, and APIs.
• Lead the design of high-scale, low-latency distributed systems that process real-time events from millions of devices.
• Own cross-team technical decisions: author and review design documents and resolve trade-offs across mobile, backend, embedded, and data teams.
• Set standards for reliability, security, observability, and operability, including SLOs, production readiness, and incident review.
• Stay hands-on: build prototypes and critical components, and lead resolution of the hardest production issues.
• Identify systemic technical debt and platform risks, and drive plans to address them, including build-vs-buy decisions.
• Mentor senior and staff engineers, help set the hiring bar, and establish engineering culture for the Seattle team.
• Partner with Product, Security, and engineering leadership to align the platform roadmap with business priorities.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field, or equivalent experience
• 10+ years of experience building and operating production systems, including several years as a technical lead at the staff or principal level
• Expert-level skills in Go, Python, Java, or similar backend languages
• Track record designing and operating large-scale distributed systems with high availability and low latency
• Deep experience with cloud-native infrastructure: containers, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and GCP or AWS
• Experience setting technical direction across multiple teams and driving adoption of standards without direct authority
• Strong written and verbal communication; able to explain trade-offs to both engineers and senior leadership

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with event-driven architectures and streaming systems (e.g., Kafka)
• Experience designing REST and/or gRPC APIs at scale, including versioning and backward compatibility
• Experience with IoT systems or device communication protocols (e.g., MQTT)
• Experience with observability and SRE practices (e.g., Datadog, OpenTelemetry, SLOs)
• Experience with NoSQL databases (e.g., MongoDB) and data modeling at scale
• Experience with video streaming technologies (e.g., MP4, HLS, ffmpeg)
• Experience with private cloud or hybrid infrastructure
• Experience building internal developer platforms or using AI-assisted development tools

Working at Vivint:

Learn about the Vivint Culture and why it’s a great place to grow your career!

Here are some highlighted perks you should ask us about:

• Paid holidays and flexible paid time away
• Employee/Friends/Family Discounts
• Medical/dental/vision/life coverage & 24/7 Medical Hotline
• 401(k) + Employer Match
• Employee Resource Groups
• Quarterly Innovation Weeks

WORKING CONDITIONS:

This job operates in a professional office environment. This role routinely uses standard office equipment such as computers, phones, photocopiers, filing cabinets and fax machines.

SAFETY:

Vivint enforces a safety culture whereby all employees have the responsibility for continuously developing and maintaining a safe working environment. Each new employee is responsible for completing all training requirements. Additionally, the employee must accept they have responsibility for maintaining the safety of themselves, their co-workers, and the public. Employee must adhere to all written and verbal instructions, promptly report and correct all hazards or unsafe conditions, question non-standard operations or unmitigated hazards, and provide feedback to management on all safety issues.

NRG Energy is committed to a drug and alcohol-free workplace. To the extent permitted by law and any applicable collective bargaining agreement, employees are subject to periodic random drug testing, and post-accident and reasonable suspicion drug and alcohol testing. EOE AA M/F/Protected Veteran Status/Disability. Level, Title and/or Salary may be adjusted based on the applicant's experience or skills.

EEO is the Law Poster (The poster can be found at http://www.eeoc.gov/employers/upload/poster_screen_reader_optimized.pdf)

Official description on file with Talent.

We support the use of AI tools to help you prepare for your interview (e.g., practicing responses, researching the role, or refining your resume). However, during interviews and assessments, we expect responses to reflect your own thinking, experience, and communication. Use of AI to generate or read answers in real time, complete assessments, or misrepresent your qualifications is not permitted and may impact your candidacy.

The base salary range for this position is: $225,000 - $285,000* *The base salary range above represents the low and high end of the salary range for this position. Actual salaries will vary based on several factors including but not limited to location, experience, and performance. The range listed is just one component of the total compensation package for employees. Other rewards may include annual bonus, short- and long-term incentives, and program-specific awards. In addition the position may be eligible to participate in the benefits program which include, but are not limited to, medical, vision, dental, 401K, and flexible spending accounts.