We are seeking a highly experienced Principal Software Engineer to serve as a technical authority for critical systems and platform architecture. This role will define and evolve the long-term technical direction of a high-performance, low-latency distributed database and its underlying systems, balancing near-term product delivery with long-term goals around scalability, reliability, performance, and operational efficiency.

The role sits at the intersection of deep technical expertise and organizational influence. You will lead through technical vision, architectural excellence, and mentorship—establishing engineering standards, solving complex cross-system challenges, and aligning technical execution with product and business objectives.

While the role may involve kernel, filesystem, hardware, networking, and low-level I/O concerns, the primary impact will come from shaping systems architecture and technical direction across multiple teams and subsystems.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and drive the long-term architecture and technical direction of core systems, particularly across networking, storage, low-level I/O, and hardware interaction.
• Act as a technical authority and escalation point for complex, high-impact systems, scalability, reliability, and performance challenges.
• Lead cross-functional and cross-team technical initiatives spanning multiple subsystems and engineering groups.
• Establish architectural principles, performance standards, engineering practices, and design guidelines across the organization.
• Translate customer and business requirements into durable technical strategies and influence product and engineering roadmaps.
• Guide and review architecture and design for performance-critical systems, ensuring correctness, consistency, scalability, and maintainability.
• Mentor Staff and Senior Staff engineers, helping develop technical leaders and raising the overall systems engineering bar.
• Represent systems architecture and technical capabilities internally and, where appropriate, with customers, partners, and the broader technical community.
• Own the end-to-end benchmarking strategy, developing rigorous methodologies to demonstrate throughput, latency, scalability, and total cost-of-ownership advantages.
• Leverage AI and machine learning models to automate complex test generation, perform root-cause analysis, analyze high-dimensional performance data, and predict system behavior under stress.
• Partner closely with Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success teams to provide technical expertise and performance evidence that supports enterprise customer engagements and strategic deals.

Minimum Qualifications

• Expert-level proficiency in C/C++, with deep expertise in low-level programming, memory management, concurrency, and performance optimization.
• Strong understanding of database internals, including storage engines, query execution, indexing, transactions, and related database architecture.
• Deep knowledge of Linux operating-system internals, including scheduling, memory management, I/O subsystems, and system-level performance.
• 10–17 years of experience building and operating complex systems software such as distributed databases, networking stacks, kernels, or storage systems.
• Proven experience defining and evolving architecture for large-scale, performance-critical production systems.
• Demonstrated ability to drive technical decisions and architectural initiatives across multiple teams without direct management authority.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Excellent technical judgment with the ability to balance short-term delivery requirements against long-term platform scalability, reliability, and maintainability.

Preferred Qualifications

• Deep experience with large-scale distributed systems and their internals, including distributed storage or database platforms.
• Strong understanding of distributed-systems concepts, including the CAP theorem, consistency models, replication, and consensus protocols such as Raft and Paxos.
• Advanced knowledge of database internals, ACID properties, indexing techniques, query execution, and storage engines.
• Expertise in performance engineering for high-throughput, low-latency systems operating at scale.
• Experience with Linux kernel development, filesystem architecture, or advanced operating-system and hardware tuning.
• Familiarity with PCIe, NVMe, DMA, RDMA, epoll, io_uring, and other low-level hardware and operating-system interfaces.
• Experience establishing or influencing company-wide engineering standards, architecture, and technical direction.
• Experience applying AI/ML techniques to performance engineering, automated testing, system diagnostics, or production analysis.

Must-Have Skills

• C++
• Database Systems
• Distributed Databases
• Distributed Systems
• Systems Programming
• Performance Optimization

Good-to-Have Skills

• Database Internals
• Linux Kernel
• Storage Systems
• Networking
• AI/ML for Automation
• Performance Engineering

 

 

Industry: Software Development

Seniority level: Mid-Senior level

 

Min Experience: 10+ years
Location: Bengaluru
JobType: full-time