Principal Engineer

Iterable is the leading AI-powered customer engagement platform that helps brands create dynamic, individualized experiences at scale. The Principal Engineer is a critical leadership role responsible for driving the technical strategy, architectural coherence, and engineering excellence across key product areas, acting as a bridge between business goals and technical execution.

Responsibilities:

• 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
• 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
• 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
• Regularly report progress, risks, and technical insights related to the architectural roadmap to executive and product leadership

Requirements:

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 5+ years as a hands on architect
• 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)
• Deep expertise in our core technology stack: Scala (Java in lieu), Play, Kafka, Flink, Pulsar, S3
• Experience building or deploying Multi-Agent Frameworks or Multi-Agent Systems
• Proven experience 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 used for building and managing agent workflows
• Strong experience with data architecture, including SQL and NoSQL databases, caching strategies, and data consistency models
• Experience in data engineering and data pipeline technologies. Our stack is Elasticsearch, Postgres, Redis and CockroachDB
• Demonstrated experience with CI/CD pipelines, observability (logging/monitoring/tracing), and DevOps practices
• Ability to drive consensus across multiple teams and stakeholders without relying solely on hierarchical authority
• Strong ability to translate complex technical concepts into non-technical terms for executive stakeholders and product managers
• A passion for teaching and upskilling other engineers; experience managing or mentoring Tech Leads is highly desirable
• Ability to balance 'perfect' architecture with pragmatic delivery timelines (knowing when to accept technical debt and when to pay it down)
• Experience transforming a monolithic architecture into modular, service oriented architecture
• Experience working directly with customers from both a functionality and triaging standpoint
• Experience working in building messaging/communication platforms at scale