Principal Software Engineer
Job Summary
Chronosphere is seeking a Principal Engineer to join their infrastructure organization, focusing on either Production Engineering or Developer Infrastructure. The role involves architecting high-scale distributed systems and driving developer velocity within a modern, containerized environment. Successful candidates will lead massive technical initiatives and define long-term platform standards for the organization.
Responsibilities
- Solving complex distributed systems problems at scale
- Scaling production infrastructure using Kubernetes, GCP, and AWS
- Designing developer tooling and CI/CD pipelines
- Leading technical initiatives and cross-team architectural strategy
- Mentoring engineering teams
Required Skills
- 8-10+ years in infrastructure or systems architecture
- Proficiency in Go, Python, Java, or C++
- Expertise in Cloud-Native systems and Kubernetes
- Deep knowledge of Linux internals and networking
- Strong background in distributed systems and IaC (Terraform)
Job Details
Production Engineering (Reliability & Scale)
- Solve complex distributed systems problems at the largest scales in the world.
- Scale our production infrastructure and architecture globally using Kubernetes, GCP, and AWS.
- Use Go to build and operate highly scalable, resilient backend services.
- Develop the internal tools necessary to monitor, alert, and optimize our live production footprint.
Dev Infrastructure (Developer Velocity & Platforms)
- Architect & Build: Design high-scale developer tooling, dynamic testing environments, and CI/CD pipelines in a 100% modern, containerized microservices ecosystem.
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Treat infrastructure as a first-class citizen by defining and managing entire ephemeral environments using declarative IaC (Terraform).
- Drive Systemic Quality: Identify and eliminate systemic bottlenecks across the development lifecycle through architectural changes, advanced tooling, and near-real-time telemetry processing.
Combined Principal-Level Leadership
- Own massive technical initiatives from inception to delivery, balancing feature velocity with long-term technical debt.
- Define platform standards and reference architectures that span a 1-3 year horizon.
- Act as the "glue" across the organization, consulting on infrastructure best practices and up-leveling the team through dedicated mentorship.
Required Qualifications
- Experience: 8-10+ years of relevant experience in high-scale infrastructure, production engineering, systems architecture, or developer platform roles.
- Language Agnosticism: 7 + years of experience in at least one backend language (e.g., Go, Python, Java, C++, C#, or Rust).
- Cloud-Native & Distributed Systems: 5 + years of deep expertise building and debugging systems that deal with CAP theorem trade-offs, eventual consistency, and distributed tracing. Robust experience working with AWS or GCP and navigating Kubernetes clusters.
- Systems Expertise: Deep knowledge of Linux internals, process management, resource isolation, and networking protocols (OSI model, load balancing, service meshes).
- Execution & Quality: A proven track record of estimating complex work effectively, debugging distributed architectures via logs/traces, and proactively identifying design edge cases.