Principal Software Engineer - Data Infrastructure

HubSpot

18h•$266,200 - $425,900•Hybrid

About The Position

HubSpot’s Data Infrastructure team builds the shared data store platforms that power the company’s products and internal systems at scale. The team’s mission is to provide a unified data platform and deliver databases as a service in a way that makes it easy, performant, and reliable for engineers across HubSpot to build on top of it. This team owns and evolves some of the most critical foundational systems inside HubSpot, including HBase, Kafka, Elasticsearch, MySQL/Vitess, Hadoop, Iceberg, and Qdrant, along with the platform capabilities, abstractions, and workflows that make those systems usable by product teams. The scope spans big data, SQL and storage infrastructure, batch processing, stream processing, and search. This is not a team focused on simply administering existing systems. It is an engineering organization responsible for shaping how HubSpot builds on top of its data stores over the long term. We’re looking for a Principal Software Engineer to help shape the technical future of Data Infrastructure at HubSpot. This is a deeply hands-on role for a builder who wants to own the architecture and evolution of the foundational data systems behind HubSpot’s products. As a Principal Engineer, you will help define how our data stores should scale, how developers should interact with them, and what platform patterns we should create so teams across HubSpot can build faster on top of reliable, high-leverage infrastructure. At HubSpot, Principal Engineers are expected to stay close to the code, lead high-impact initiatives end-to-end, and influence technical direction well beyond a single team. This role is for someone who can move between storage engines, developer-facing platform design, and large-scale architectural bets while remaining a hands-on builder throughout.

Requirements

Deep experience building and evolving large-scale distributed systems, especially storage systems, data infrastructure, or foundational backend platforms.
Strong architectural instincts with a bias toward simplicity, consistency, clear boundaries, and long-term platform leverage.
A track record of owning and delivering complex, cross-team technical initiatives with product-line or company-level impact.
Comfort working across multiple layers of the stack, from storage engines and data flows to APIs, internal frameworks, and developer experience.
A hands-on mindset. You lead by building, debugging, reviewing, and shipping, not by staying removed from the systems you influence.
The ability to move into unfamiliar technical territory quickly, form strong opinions grounded in first principles, and help teams make better long-term decisions.

Responsibilities

Own the future of HubSpot’s data stores: Shape the technical direction for the data platforms that underpin HubSpot’s products, with a focus on the data stores themselves and the systems around them. Drive architectural decisions across storage, access patterns, scaling models, tenancy, performance, and developer ergonomics. Help define what the next generation of HubSpot’s database platform should look like, not just how to operate the current one.
Be a deeply hands-on, high-leverage builder: Write production code regularly and lead complex initiatives from idea to rollout. Build internal frameworks, APIs, and platform capabilities that make HubSpot’s data stores easier to adopt, extend, and evolve. Turn ambiguous infrastructure problems into simple, scalable systems and clear technical direction.
Lead platform architecture across multiple domains: Work across big data, SQL/Vitess, batch, stream processing, and search to establish consistent platform patterns where they matter and domain-specific depth where they do not. Define reusable abstractions for data storage, ingestion, processing, and access that reduce fragmentation across the engineering organization. Push for simplicity, clarity, and extensibility in systems that can easily become overly bespoke or operationally heavy.
Influence across the broader engineering org: Partner with engineering and product leaders to align infrastructure direction with what HubSpot needs to build next. Work horizontally across teams to guide technical tradeoffs, unblock difficult decisions, and raise the architectural bar for platform work. Act as a multiplier through design reviews, technical mentoring, and principled decision-making on the most important systems in the space.