Principal Software Engineer - Hosting

Pantheon is a company that powers over 300,000 websites globally, providing a WebOps platform for developers and marketers. They are seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead the Hosting Platform team, responsible for the infrastructure supporting millions of websites and billions of page views. This role involves defining technical roadmaps, architecting core services, and providing technical leadership across the engineering organization.

Responsibilities:

• Define and drive the technical roadmap for platform reliability, scalability, and performance across hundreds of thousands of sites and billions of monthly requests
• Architect, build, and evolve the core services underpinning Pantheon’s hosting platform — including edge delivery, container orchestration, database services, and site lifecycle management
• Partner with product, security, and infrastructure teams to identify root causes and design iterative, high-impact solutions
• Balance immediate business needs against long-term architectural health, making principled trade-offs that keep the platform sustainable as it scales
• Provide technical leadership across the engineering organization — setting direction, reviewing designs, and raising the bar for quality, reliability, and operability
• Mentor and coach engineers at all levels, providing technical guidance and growing engineering talent across the broader organization
• Contribute to an engineering-wide culture of collaboration, blameless postmortems, and continuous improvement

Requirements:

• 10+ years of software development experience, with significant tenure building platform or infrastructure products
• 5+ years of experience designing and architecting large-scale distributed systems
• Proficiency with container orchestration (Kubernetes), web server technologies (NGINX, PHP, Node.js, or similar), and infrastructure-as-code practices
• Demonstrated ability to own and improve a production platform serving millions of concurrent users or requests
• Proficiency in Go, Python, or equivalent systems-oriented languages
• Deep expertise in distributed systems design, large-scale service architecture, and cloud-native infrastructure (Pantheon runs on Google Cloud)
• Experience building or operating CDN, edge delivery, or networking-layer systems at scale — including caching strategies, cache invalidation, and edge performance optimization
• Strong understanding of multi-tenant hosting platforms — including the SLO definition, observability, and incident response required to operate them at scale for hundreds of thousands of customer sites
• Experience operating database systems as managed services — relational and non-relational — with appreciation for the operational complexity involved
• AI-native engineering practices — including fluency with AI coding assistants (GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code) and a track record of integrating AI tools into engineering workflows, automation, and architectural decision-making
• Experience building agentic and LLM-powered systems — including task orchestration, prompt engineering, and RAG — with the ability to prototype and ship AI features to production
• Awareness of the infrastructure requirements of AI workloads — including model serving, GPU/accelerator provisioning, inference latency optimization, and cost trade-offs at scale