Principal Software Engineer-SRE

PTC is a leader in transforming the physical and digital worlds. The Principal Software Engineer will play a critical role in ensuring the reliability, scalability, and operational excellence of the Onshape platform, leading initiatives and shaping reliability strategy across engineering.

Responsibilities:

• Own Reliability at Scale
• Lead design, implementation, and evolution of reliability, availability, and resiliency strategies for large‑scale distributed systems written primarily in Java
• Apply deep experience operating complex, distributed systems to guide architectural decisions, reliability strategies, and long‑term system evolution
• Identify systemic risks in application architecture, data flows, and infrastructure, and drive architectural improvements that measurably improve availability, performance, and scalability
• Set and evolve reliability standards, best practices, and operational principles across R&D
• Drive Operational Excellence
• Lead efforts to prevent, detect, and mitigate incidents through technical improvements and operational maturity
• Serve as a senior coordination point during major incidents, helping manage response and guide long‑term remediation
• Champion blameless post-incident reviews and ensure learnings translate into durable system improvements
• Reduce Toil Through Engineering
• Apply advanced software engineering practices to eliminate manual work, reduce operational load, and improve system observability
• Design and build internal platforms, automation, and tooling that support Java‑based services and their operational needs
• Raise the bar on monitoring, alerting, and SLO/SLI adoption across systems
• Lead Through Influence and Collaboration
• Partner deeply with product engineers, architects, and engineering leadership to ensure reliability and operability are first‑class concerns in system design
• Review and influence designs for complex systems involving technologies such as datastores, messaging systems, and coordination services
• Serve as a technical mentor and coach for SREs and other engineers, raising overall engineering and operational maturity
• Shape Strategy and Direction
• Contribute to longer‑term reliability and infrastructure strategy aligned with business growth
• Stay current with industry trends in SRE, distributed systems, and the Java ecosystem, turning insights into practical improvements
• Help define what 'great reliability' looks like for the organization and how we measure it

Requirements:

• US Citizenship or Permanent Residents only due to ITAR requirements
• Ability to work east coast (EST) hours. And be available for on-call rotation once every 10 weeks
• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, site reliability engineering, or systems engineering roles
• Extremely strong proficiency with the Java programming language and its ecosystem, including building, debugging, and operating production Java services
• Deep experience operating complex, distributed systems in production environments
• Strong software engineering background, with a track record of delivering high-quality, maintainable code
• Expert understanding of incident management, service reliability, and performance engineering
• Strong hands-on experience with observability (metrics, logs, traces), capacity planning, and SLO-driven reliability
• Deep familiarity with modern cloud-based infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure-as-code practices
• Ability to reason about failure modes across application, data, and infrastructure layers
• Demonstrated ability to lead complex initiatives that span teams and organizational boundaries
• Comfortable making high-impact technical decisions in ambiguous environments
• Strong communicator who can influence design and operational decisions across a wide range of stakeholders
• Systems thinker focused on root-cause analysis and durable fixes
• Calm and effective under pressure, especially during high-severity incidents
• Curious, data-driven, and committed to continuous improvement
• Experience operating or supporting systems using technologies such as MongoDB, ZooKeeper, and RabbitMQ
• Background in performance tuning and scalability optimization of Java services
• Experience setting or influencing engineering standards at the organization level
• Prior involvement in evolving SRE or platform practices in a growing engineering organization
• Experience designing, operating, or scaling systems in cloud environments such as AWS (preferred), including familiarity with core services, networking models, and reliability features