Principal Software Engineer - PA172

ZoomInfo Technologies LLC•Bethesda, MD

16d•$163,800 - $257,400•Remote

About The Position

As a Principal Engineer on ZoomInfo's Advertising, Company Intelligence, and Intent team, you will help design and implement the core systems that power their real-time marketing platform. This role involves working on high-throughput ad infrastructure, large-scale identity resolution, and intelligent systems enhanced by LLMs, pushing the boundaries of scale, intelligence, and speed to deliver real-world business impact. You will join a team with a broad range of ambitious, technically deep projects, including APIs processing tens of billions of events per day, new buyer intent algorithms powered by LLMs, and a unified B2B identity graph. The role is in a high-growth, high-ownership environment operating at the edge of modern software engineering, data infrastructure, and applied AI.

Requirements

8+ years of backend, data, or infrastructure engineering experience, or equivalent impact and leadership.
Strong experience in at least one of the following: Distributed systems engineering (e.g., building low latency high and throughput APIs, scalable microservices, event processing pipelines), Big data infrastructure (e.g., streaming, warehousing, low-latency storage at scale), Applied AI/ML, including use of LLMs for extraction, classification, or reasoning tasks
Proficiency in one or more core languages: Java, Go, Python
Solid grasp of SQL and large-scale data modeling
Familiarity with databases and tools such as: ClickHouse, DynamoDB, Bigtable, Memcached, Kafka, Kinesis, Firehose, Airflow, Snowflake
AI-Native Development Mindset
Comfortable using LLMs as part of your development workflow—whether via tools like Copilot, Cursor, ChatGPT, Claude, or others—to boost productivity, explore architecture ideas, and rapidly prototype.
Skilled at designing and implementing LLM-powered systems such as RAG pipelines, agent frameworks (e.g., LangGraph), or intelligent workflows that reason across large datasets in real time.

Nice To Haves

Experience in ad tech, real-time bidding (RTB), or programmatic systems
Background in identity resolution, attribution, or behavioral analytics at scale
Contributions to open source in ML, infrastructure, or data tooling
Strong product instincts and a passion for building tools that drive meaningful outcomes

Responsibilities

Design and build distributed systems that process, enrich, and respond to billions of behavioral events per day in real time
Develop high-performance APIs and services that support advertising, identity, and intent features across the Marketing Platform
Leverage machine learning and large language models (LLMs) to analyze behavioral data, classify content, extract signals, and enable intelligent decision-making
Build intelligent agents using frameworks like LangGraph or MCP to reason over data and power user-facing insights
Design and operate data pipelines using tools like Kafka, Kinesis, and ClickHouse to support both streaming and batch workloads
Drive quality, performance, scalability, and observability across all systems you own
Collaborate cross-functionally with product managers, data scientists, and engineers to deliver customer-facing features and internal tooling
Contribute to technical leadership and mentorship of teammates