Principal Engineer, Distributed Systems

CoreWeave•Sunnyvale, CA

3d•$227,000 - $303,000•Onsite

About The Position

We are looking for a Principal Engineer to provide technical leadership across Security Products. This is a senior individual-contributor role for an engineer who can define architecture, guide execution across multiple teams, and solve complex distributed-systems problems in security-critical infrastructure. The systems you help design will support demanding production requirements: four nines of availability, high scalability, consistently low latency, strong security boundaries, and safe behavior under partial failure in a multi-region setup. You will work across the full lifecycle of these systems, from architecture and technical strategy through implementation guidance, operational readiness, incident learning, and long-term evolution. Your work will span across high-scale authorization systems, anomaly detection systems, bot-defense and security token service (STS), API authentication gateway, and the shared infrastructure required to operate these capabilities reliably across regions and deployment environments. You will partner with engineering, security, infrastructure, networking, platform, product, and customer-facing teams. Success in this role requires both deep technical judgment and the ability to create alignment, raise engineering standards, and make complex architecture understandable and actionable for others.

Requirements

12+ years of experience designing and building production software, including substantial experience with distributed systems and platform infrastructure.
A track record of serving as a principal, staff-plus, distinguished, or equivalent technical leader across multiple teams or a broad technical domain.
Deep expertise in distributed-systems design, including scalability, availability, latency, consistency, concurrency, partition tolerance, caching, replication, and failure recovery.
Experience designing and operating security-sensitive or reliability-critical services in production.
Strong software engineering experience with one or more systems languages or backend ecosystems, such as Go, Java, Rust, C++, Python, or equivalent.
Demonstrated ability to move from ambiguous requirements to clear architecture, sequenced execution plans, and durable engineering outcomes.
Experience making architecture decisions that balance security, correctness, performance, operational simplicity, and time to value.
Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to influence without direct authority and build alignment across organizational boundaries.
A track record of improving engineering standards, mentoring senior engineers, and helping teams deliver complex systems safely.

Nice To Haves

Experience designing and implementing authorization systems at high scale, including policy engines, permission models, policy distribution, decision services, enforcement points, or authorization observability.
Experience designing or operating a Security Token Service, identity platform, credential service, or comparable security-critical control plane.
Experience designing or operating an API Authentication Gateway, service-mesh authorization layer, or centralized authentication and authorization platform.
Experience operating systems with four-nines availability requirements, high request volume, strict latency objectives, and demanding reliability expectations.
Experience with multi-region architecture, regional failover, active-active or active-passive operation, replication, disaster recovery, and regional isolation.
Experience reasoning about strong, eventual, and bounded-staleness consistency models, especially for security policy, credentials, tokens, permissions, and revocation.
Experience designing for data residency, regional data controls, tenant isolation, trust-domain separation, and compliance-sensitive deployment models.
Experience building systems that remain secure and useful during dependency failures, network partitions, regional outages, stale data, degraded capacity, or partial compromise.
Experience with authentication and identity standards such as OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, SAML, SCIM, JWT, mTLS, SPIFFE/SPIRE, or related protocols.
Experience with cryptography, key management, HSMs, secrets management, certificate authorities, signing keys, token validation, or secure credential lifecycle management.
Experience with Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, service networking, distributed storage, messaging systems, and multi-cluster operations.
Experience building security and platform services with strong observability, including metrics, logs, traces, audit records, security events, and actionable alerting.
Experience working with enterprise customers, regulated workloads, or hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Responsibilities

Establish architectural approaches for distributed systems - multi-region operation, including service placement, failover, replication, traffic management, disaster recovery, and regional independence.
Drive decisions around consistency models, caching, invalidation, propagation, revocation, idempotency, concurrency, and ordering where correctness and security are critical.
Design for data residency, tenant isolation, trust boundaries, blast-radius reduction, and controlled handling of sensitive security data.
Define fault-tolerance strategies for dependencies, networks, regions, storage systems, and control-plane components, including graceful degradation and safe recovery.
Design systems that meet four-nines availability goals while maintaining predictable low latency and high throughput under normal operation, traffic spikes, and partial failures.
Improve the reliability and operability of critical services through SLOs, error budgets, metrics, logs, traces, audit events, alerting, incident response, and post-incident learning.
Guide teams through architecture reviews, design reviews, implementation tradeoffs, capacity planning, load testing, performance analysis, and production readiness assessments.
Mentor senior and staff engineers, develop technical talent, and raise the quality of engineering practice across the organization.
Communicate architecture, tradeoffs, risks, and recommendations clearly to technical and executive audiences.
Lead the design of high-scale authorization systems that support policy authoring, policy evaluation, access-control enforcement, auditability, and integration across many services and tenants.
Provide technical direction for a Security Token Service, including token issuance, validation, lifecycle management, trust relationships, key rotation, revocation, and secure service-to-service access.
Guide the design and implementation of an API Authentication Gateway that provides consistent, secure, observable authentication and authorization for CoreWeave APIs.
Set technical standards for API design, service contracts, threat modeling, cryptographic key management, secrets handling, observability, and operational readiness.
Partner with service teams to make authorization and authentication capabilities easy to adopt through clear interfaces, SDKs, reference implementations, documentation, and reliable integration patterns.