Principal Software Engineer – Next-Generation API & AI Platform Architecture

SpyCloud is on a mission to make the internet a safer place by disrupting the criminal underground. They are seeking a Principal Engineer to lead the architecture and development of next-generation data and intelligence APIs, focusing on scalability and high-performance integration. This hands-on role requires deep technical knowledge and leadership in API design and distributed systems.

Responsibilities:

• Architect and implement customer-facing data and intelligence APIs with clear versioning, SLAs, and backward compatibility
• Define and enforce API contracts for: Low latency, high throughput endpoints, Agentic workflows (tools, actions, state transitions, handoffs), Context retrieval and enrichment
• Design APIs as durable platform interfaces, not thin wrappers over storage systems
• Establish standards for schema governance, payload design, and service boundaries
• Architect service layers that support agentic workflows, including orchestration interfaces, guardrails, and runtime observability
• Build API surfaces that expose model outputs safely and consistently
• Collaborate with MLEs and Data Scientists to move models from experimentation into robust inference services
• Ensure proper lifecycle management, monitoring, and rollback mechanisms for ML-powered endpoints
• Design and implement service layers that sit on top of the gold-layer system of record
• Build and evolve context hubs derived from authoritative systems of record, enabling consistent entity, identity, or risk context for downstream services
• Ensure APIs are aligned with medallion architecture principles and platform data contracts
• Prevent fragmentation by maintaining strong coupling to canonical schemas and governed data models
• Design high-throughput, low-latency services supporting batch and streaming workloads
• Implement scalable infrastructure patterns on AWS
• Ensure strong observability, error handling, performance tuning, and cost awareness
• Drive infrastructure-as-code practices and production readiness standards
• Serve as a senior architectural voice in design reviews
• Raise the bar on code quality, system design, and operational rigor
• Mentor engineers on API design, distributed systems, and ML integration patterns
• Influence platform direction through technical depth rather than organizational authority

Requirements:

• 10+ years of experience building distributed systems, APIs, or large-scale data platforms
• Deep experience designing and implementing customer-facing APIs as long-lived products
• Strong understanding of schema governance, versioning strategies, and contract design
• Experience productionizing ML models and exposing inference services
• Experience designing or integrating agentic or autonomous workflows
• Experience building service layers on top of systems of record or semantic data layers
• Strong background in distributed systems reliability, observability, and scalability
• Proficiency in Go & Python (and/or backend service languages)
• Hands-on experience with Databricks/Snowflake
• Strong experience with AWS infrastructure and infrastructure-as-code tools
• AWS services including Redshift, S3, EC2, and related cloud-native tooling
• Data stores including Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL, Redis, and graph databases (e.g., Neo4j or AWS Neptune)
• Experience building high-performance APIs and service layers over heterogeneous data systems
• Familiarity with Databricks/Snowflake and/or SageMaker is a plus
• Experience in cybersecurity, identity, fraud, or risk systems is a plus