Principal Software Engineer, Workload Orchestration (Distributed Compute))

Location: US Remote, Germany, United Kingdom

Department: Engineering

Location Type: REMOTE

Employment Type: FULL_TIME

About nTop

The Role

What You'll Own

• Projects (1-3 months). Platform work with a clear goal that you scope and drive to done. Examples: extracting a subsystem from our C++/Python monolith behind a clean interface, building a path for submitting and scheduling workloads on cloud or on-prem clusters, or moving part of our file format toward an open, text-based structure.
• One open platform problem (1-3 quarters). A question the team knows matters but can't yet answer, such as how to run thousands of parallel simulation jobs reliably across mixed on-prem and cloud GPU environments. You investigate, prototype, compare approaches and trade-offs, and recommend what to build.
• Cross-team delivery. Your projects touch our other engineering teams and the domain specialists who built much of the codebase. You keep those dependencies moving and make sure everyone knows how your work connects to theirs.
• Quality and speed. Better tests, clearer interfaces, and faster feedback loops in the code you touch, so the next engineer has an easier time.

What You'll Accomplish

• First 3 months: Learn the codebase and who depends on it. Deliver a first scoped project with a defined finish line.
• By month 6: Own a larger cross-team project from design through deployment, with your plan, status, and trade-offs visible to the people relying on it.
• By month 12: Own an open platform problem. Present a researched recommendation, and drive at least one resulting project into production.

What You Bring

• 6+ years of professional software engineering, with a record of owning projects end to end and delivering across team boundaries.
• Strong C++ experience building production systems; comfortable working in Python as well.
• Hands-on experience with distributed or parallel systems, such as job scheduling, workload orchestration, cluster or cloud compute, or fault-tolerant services.
• Experience improving a large, long-lived codebase step by step: refactoring, API design, or extracting modules without breaking existing users.
• Comfort with ambiguity. You can take a fuzzy problem, research it, weigh options, and make a clear recommendation, including "not yet."
• Clear written and spoken communication. You earn trust across teams by explaining your reasoning and following through.
• A habit of helping teammates grow, through code review, documentation, and pairing.

• High-performance computing, GPU workloads, or scientific computing
• File format, serialization, or protocol design
• Programming language or domain-specific language tooling; exposure to Rust
• CAD/CAM, simulation, or aerospace and manufacturing software
• Working with technically sophisticated customers

You might not be the right fit if

• You want every task defined for you before you start. Here you scope your own work.
• You prefer to stay deep in one narrow specialty rather than work across the platform.
• You're looking to set company-wide technical direction for several years from day one. If that's you, let's talk about other roles.

Why nTop