Principal Software Engineer, Platform

Vivint, an NRG-owned company, is hiring a Principal Platform Engineer to set technical direction for its core platform, including cloud services, event pipelines, APIs, and IoT integrations. The role owns architecture across teams, leads complex technical work hands-on, and helps establish engineering standards and culture.

Responsibilities:

• Define the technical strategy and multi-year architecture for core platform services, event pipelines, and APIs
• Lead the design of high-scale, low-latency distributed systems that process real-time events from millions of devices
• Own cross-team technical decisions: author and review design documents and resolve trade-offs across mobile, backend, embedded, and data teams
• Set standards for reliability, security, observability, and operability, including SLOs, production readiness, and incident review
• Stay hands-on: build prototypes and critical components, and lead resolution of the hardest production issues
• Identify systemic technical debt and platform risks, and drive plans to address them, including build-vs-buy decisions
• Mentor senior and staff engineers, help set the hiring bar, and establish engineering culture for the Seattle team
• Partner with Product, Security, and engineering leadership to align the platform roadmap with business priorities

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field, or equivalent experience
• 10+ years of experience building and operating production systems, including several years as a technical lead at the staff or principal level
• Expert-level skills in Go, Python, Java, or similar backend languages
• Track record designing and operating large-scale distributed systems with high availability and low latency
• Deep experience with cloud-native infrastructure: containers, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and GCP or AWS
• Experience setting technical direction across multiple teams and driving adoption of standards without direct authority
• Strong written and verbal communication; able to explain trade-offs to both engineers and senior leadership
• Experience with event-driven architectures and streaming systems (e.g., Kafka)
• Experience designing REST and/or gRPC APIs at scale, including versioning and backward compatibility
• Experience with IoT systems or device communication protocols (e.g., MQTT)
• Experience with observability and SRE practices (e.g., Datadog, OpenTelemetry, SLOs)
• Experience with NoSQL databases (e.g., MongoDB) and data modeling at scale
• Experience with video streaming technologies (e.g., MP4, HLS, ffmpeg)
• Experience with private cloud or hybrid infrastructure
• Experience building internal developer platforms or using AI-assisted development tools