Description:

The Core Platform team at Sift builds and evolves the foundational systems that power online services.
As a Principal Engineer, you will play a critical leadership role in shaping the technical strategy, architecture, and direction of the infrastructure and services platform.
You will drive initiatives that enhance the availability, reliability, scalability, and performance of systems, ensuring they are resilient, secure, and aligned with customer and business needs.
This role is ideal for a hands-on engineering leader who thrives in solving complex distributed systems challenges, mentors others, and influences technology and organizational strategy across teams.
Responsibilities include providing technical leadership for Sift’s online infrastructure, driving architecture and design of immutable, fault-tolerant infrastructure, and leading the implementation of multi-region deployments.
You will solve high-scale problems, guide improvements to developer workflows, architect robust internal libraries, and develop proactive monitoring systems.
You will act as a strategic advisor to engineering teams and participate in evolving the on-call strategy while mentoring senior engineers.

Requirements:

You must have 10+ years of experience in Software Engineering, SRE, or Infrastructure roles, focusing on distributed systems and platform-level challenges.
Deep expertise in designing, scaling, and operating cloud-native systems on AWS or GCP is required.
Proven ability to architect infrastructure as code with tools like Terraform or CloudFormation is necessary.
Advanced programming skills in languages such as Java, Python, or Scala are essential.
Extensive experience with messaging systems (e.g., Kafka) and distributed databases (e.g., BigTable, Snowflake) is required.
Strong knowledge of containerization and orchestration technologies such as Kubernetes is needed.
A track record of reducing operational complexity through automation, observability, and self-healing systems is important.
Experience influencing architectural decisions across multiple engineering teams is necessary.
Excellent collaboration and communication skills, with a history of mentoring and cross-functional leadership, are required.