Principal Engineer – Cloud and Datacenter Software

Intel Corporation • Santa Clara, CA

13d • Hybrid

About The Position

We are seeking a highly capable Principal Engineer to help shape the future of datacenter and cloud software. In this pivotal role, you will engage deeply with customer technologists, define optimization opportunities across the software stack, and influence technical direction across both Intel and the broader industry. You will architect innovative solutions, optimize workloads, and drive technical excellence that accelerates customer success and Intel platform leadership. What You'll Do• Engage directly with major customers to understand their use cases, application architectures, and performance critical needs, translating these into actionable architecture and optimization strategies.• Influence and define technical direction across Intel and the industry as a recognized domain expert, acting as a change agent and role model for Intel values.• Lead the architecture and optimization of customer workloads across cloud, on premise, and hyperscale environments, leveraging Intel platform software, industry software, compilers, tools, libraries, and frameworks.• Mentor and develop junior technical leaders, grow the technical community, and align organizational goals with a cohesive technical vision.• Identify and define opportunities for future architecture optimizations, including NUMA, cache awareness, branch prediction, and other advancements tailored for next generation Intel platforms.• Help drive Intel's participation and leadership in opensource communities (e.g., Spark, Postgres, MySQL, Go, zstd) and identify areas where deeper engagement will strengthen the ecosystem. Why This Role Matters: This position will play a critical leadership role in shaping the next generation of Intel software and silicon codesign. Your influence will span customer engagement, internal technical strategy, ecosystem development, and cross industry collaboration - all driving Intel's long term competitiveness and customer value.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or equivalent industry experience.
• 10+ years of experience developing or architecting workloads or software frameworks, with 5+ in cloud and data center.
• 3+ years of direct customerfacing experience.
• Demonstrated expertise in workload optimization, profiling tools, and cloud software architecture.

Nice To Haves

• Master's degree or PhD in a relevant technical field.
• Experience communicating with customers, technical teams, and management to gather requirements, analyze workloads, design experiments, and propose optimizations.
• Documented contributions to the cloud technology industry (e.g., whitepapers, conference presentations, patents, code contributions, technical blogs).
• Familiarity with performance tooling, compiler technologies, software libraries, and workload profiling methodologies.
• Expertise in one or more cloud workload categories such as data services, web, AI, storage or media workloads.
• Ability to optimize workloads for future Intel architectures.

Responsibilities

• Engage directly with major customers to understand their use cases, application architectures, and performance critical needs, translating these into actionable architecture and optimization strategies.
• Influence and define technical direction across Intel and the industry as a recognized domain expert, acting as a change agent and role model for Intel values.
• Lead the architecture and optimization of customer workloads across cloud, on premise, and hyperscale environments, leveraging Intel platform software, industry software, compilers, tools, libraries, and frameworks.
• Mentor and develop junior technical leaders, grow the technical community, and align organizational goals with a cohesive technical vision.
• Identify and define opportunities for future architecture optimizations, including NUMA, cache awareness, branch prediction, and other advancements tailored for next generation Intel platforms.
• Help drive Intel's participation and leadership in opensource communities (e.g., Spark, Postgres, MySQL, Go, zstd) and identify areas where deeper engagement will strengthen the ecosystem.

Benefits

• We offer a total compensation package that ranks among the best in the industry. It consists of competitive pay, stock bonuses, and benefit programs which include health, retirement, and vacation.
• Find out more about the benefits of working at Intel.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level