Principal Engineer

The Principal Engineer is a critical, senior leadership role responsible for driving the technical strategy, architectural coherence, and engineering excellence across several key product areas. This role acts as a bridge between high-level business goals and on-the-ground technical execution, ensuring the product is built correctly, efficiently, and with a long-term vision.

### Architectural Leadership & Strategy - Serve as the technical authority for multiple core product areas, ensuring all architectural decisions directly support the business objectives for those areas. - Establish and maintain organization-wide technical standards, architectural patterns, and coding best practices to ensure consistency, security, performance, and maintainability across all teams. - Support decision making by providing expert architectural guidance and data-driven recommendations to leadership and engineering teams, facilitating timely and sound technical decisions. ### Technical Management & Mentorship - Directly mentor, guide, and lead the technical direction of the Tech Leads and senior engineers within the domains, fostering a high-performance engineering culture. - Oversee and approve key design documents and high-level architectural proposals, ensuring they adhere to organizational standards and the own building and maintaining a long-term architectural roadmap. - Act as an escalation point for complex technical challenges, actively supporting teams in overcoming significant architectural hurdles or design issues. ### Communication & Vision - Pull teams up to give them the big picture and let them see connections: Define and communicate the overall architectural vision and strategy to engineering teams, helping them understand how their individual contributions connect to the broader product and business goals. - Report on roadmap: Regularly report progress, risks, and technical insights related to the architectural roadmap to executive and product leadership.

### Experience & Technical Skills - 10+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 5+ years as a hands-on architect. - System Design: Proven track record of architecting and delivering complex, high-scale, distributed systems (e.g., Microservices, Event-Driven Architecture) in a cloud environment (AWS/GCP/Azure). - Technical Depth: Deep expertise in core technology stack: Scala (Java in lieu), Play, Kafka, Flink, Pulsar, S3. - AI: Experience building or deploying Multi-Agent Frameworks or Multi-Agent Systems; working with multiple LLMs (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, etc.) and understanding their strengths and limitations; expertise in orchestration software like LangGraph or similar frameworks. - Data Engineering, Pipeline and Storage: Strong experience with data architecture, including SQL and NoSQL databases, caching strategies, and data consistency models; experience in data engineering and data pipeline technologies; stack includes Elasticsearch, Postgres, Redis, CockroachDB. - Operational Excellence: CI/CD, observability (logging/monitoring/tracing), and DevOps practices; experience with consumer-scale systems at enterprise software companies. ### Leadership & Soft Skills - Influence without Authority: ability to drive consensus across multiple teams and stakeholders without relying solely on hierarchical authority. - Business Acumen: translate complex technical concepts for executive stakeholders and product managers. - Mentorship: passion for teaching and upskilling engineers; experience managing or mentoring Tech Leads is desirable. - Strategic Thinking: balance architecture perfection with pragmatic delivery timelines.

Iterable is an AI-powered customer engagement platform that helps global brands create personalized experiences across every channel to drive growth. It enables marketing teams to respond in real time with a platform that learns, adapts, and improves interactions. The company focuses on enriching relationships between consumers and brands.