Principal Software Engineer Lead

Akamai•Cambridge, MA

3d•$169,300 - $304,700•Hybrid

About The Position

Join our Compute team! Our team's mission is to accelerate innovation by making computing simple, scalable, accessible, and affordable for all. We provide the infrastructure and services that enable developers to build next-generation applications. We take ownership of the design and development of core compute interfaces, virtualization management, APIs, and low-level platform services. As a Principal Software Engineer, you will own the design of the control plane that places, reconciles, and operates VMs across the Compute fleet.

Requirements

12 years of experience in building distributed systems along with experience in owning control planes or large-scale orchestration or its equivalent
Deep database experience with SQL, including partitioning, sharding, replication, and online schema change.
Built asynchronous systems: durable task queues, event-driven workflows, and retry and backpressure design.
Hands-on experience building and operating containerized applications, including Kubernetes.
Good competence in Python or Go; experience with the other or with ColdFusion is good, but not required.
Deep understanding of consistency (leases, fencing, idempotency, optimistic concurrency) and hands-on experience with reconciliation or controller patterns (Kubernetes-style controllers or equivalent).

Responsibilities

Defining the database partitioning and sharding strategy to scale control plane state management 5x, with capacity models for placement and inventory state.
Owning the placement reconciliation loop: desired-state model, idempotent reconcilers, drift detection, and reconciliation-lag SLOs.
Generalizing bulk and asynchronous operations into one model with standard operation resources, batching, concurrency caps, and automatic halt on failure thresholds.
Setting consistency guarantees per data path, enforcing idempotency and fencing on controller actions, and specifying saga-style workflows.