Principal Software Engineer, Developer Acceleration (Release Engineering)

HubSpot•Cambridge, MA

8d•$266,200 - $425,900•Hybrid

About The Position

HubSpot's Developer Acceleration group empowers over 2,000 engineers to build, test, and deploy their code at scale. The release engineering team owns the full delivery pipeline — from pull request to production — and is responsible for hundreds of thousands of builds per day, including tens of thousands of QA deployments. We're in the middle of a fundamental shift. Agentic AI is changing what release engineering can look like — from AI-powered QA agents that evaluate every deploy, to systems that can reason about risk, surface anomalies, and make autonomous decisions in the delivery pipeline. The team is actively building toward this future, and the opportunity for someone who can help shape it is significant. The team owns and evolves some of the most critical foundational systems inside HubSpot's engineering organization, including build infrastructure, test orchestration, deployment pipelines, and the tooling that underpins incident management and production reliability. This is not a team focused on maintaining existing systems. It is an engineering organization responsible for rethinking how software is shipped at scale — and what becomes possible when intelligent agents are embedded throughout that process. We're looking for a Principal Software Engineer to help define the technical future of release engineering at HubSpot — at the intersection of large-scale distributed systems and agentic AI. The role of AI in software delivery is no longer theoretical. We're actively deploying AI agents across our build, test, and deploy pipeline, and we're only at the beginning of understanding what's possible. This is a rare opportunity to work on infrastructure problems that very few engineers have encountered — at a scale that demands novel approaches — while helping to define what AI-native release engineering looks like in practice. 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 infrastructure architecture, agentic AI systems, and large-scale delivery pipeline design while remaining a hands-on builder throughout.

Requirements

Deep experience building and evolving large-scale distributed systems, particularly in CI/CD, build infrastructure, release engineering, or foundational backend platforms.
Strong architectural instincts with a bias toward simplicity, clarity, and long-term platform leverage — and a healthy skepticism toward complexity that isn't earned.
Experience operating at hyperscaler or platform-provider scale.
A track record of owning and delivering complex, cross-team technical initiatives with org-wide or company-level impact.
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 release engineering platform
Shape the technical direction for the build, test, and deploy systems that underpin how HubSpot ships software.
Drive architectural decisions across pipeline design, test infrastructure, deployment orchestration, and developer ergonomics.
Help define what the next generation of HubSpot's delivery 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.
Design and implement AI-powered QA agents that run on every deploy, reducing risk and increasing confidence in continuous delivery.
Turn ambiguous infrastructure problems into simple, scalable systems and clear technical direction.
Rethink testing and delivery infrastructure for a new era
Challenge 10-year-old assumptions about build systems and deployment pipelines given what's actually possible today.
Rethink testing infrastructure for a world where software behavior is increasingly non-deterministic.
Drive the roadmap toward 500+ deploys per minute, identifying and eliminating bottlenecks across the delivery pipeline.
Influence across the broader engineering org
Partner with engineering leaders to align release engineering direction with what HubSpot needs to build next.
Work horizontally across teams to guide technical tradeoffs, rationalize configuration and change management across concurrent teams, and raise the architectural bar for platform work.
Act as a multiplier through design reviews, technical mentoring, and principled decision-making on the most critical systems in the space.