Principal Software Engineer, Platform
About The Position
Vivint Smart Home, an NRG-owned company, is seeking a Principal Platform Engineer to set technical direction for its core platform, including cloud services, event pipelines, APIs, and IoT integrations powering millions of connected homes. This is a senior individual-contributor role involving architecture ownership across multiple teams, hands-on leadership of complex technical problems, and raising the engineering bar for the Seattle team. The role partners with Product, Security, and engineering leadership to align the platform roadmap with business priorities. It operates in a professional office environment and routinely uses standard office equipment. Employees are expected to complete required safety training and contribute to maintaining a safe working environment.
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
- 10+ years of experience building and operating production systems, including several years as a technical lead at the staff or principal level.
- Expert-level skills in Go, Python, Java, or similar backend languages.
- Track record designing and operating large-scale distributed systems with high availability and low latency.
- Deep experience with cloud-native infrastructure, including containers, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and GCP or AWS.
- Experience setting technical direction across multiple teams and driving adoption of standards without direct authority.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain trade-offs to engineers and senior leadership.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with event-driven architectures and streaming systems such as Kafka.
- Experience designing REST and/or gRPC APIs at scale, including versioning and backward compatibility.
- Experience with IoT systems or device communication protocols such as MQTT.
- Experience with observability and SRE practices such as Datadog, OpenTelemetry, and SLOs.
- Experience with NoSQL databases such as MongoDB and data modeling at scale.
- Experience with video streaming technologies such as MP4, HLS, and ffmpeg.
- Experience with private cloud or hybrid infrastructure.
- Experience building internal developer platforms or using AI-assisted development tools.
Responsibilities
- Define the technical strategy and multi-year architecture for core platform services, event pipelines, and APIs.
- Lead the design of high-scale, low-latency distributed systems that process real-time events from millions of devices.
- Own cross-team technical decisions by authoring and reviewing design documents and resolving trade-offs across mobile, backend, embedded, and data teams.
- Set standards for reliability, security, observability, and operability, including SLOs, production readiness, and incident review.
- Build prototypes and critical components, and lead the resolution of the hardest production issues.
- Identify systemic technical debt and platform risks, and drive plans to address them, including build-versus-buy decisions.
- Mentor senior and staff engineers, help set the hiring bar, and establish engineering culture for the Seattle team.
- Partner with Product, Security, and engineering leadership to align the platform roadmap with business priorities.
Benefits
- Paid holidays and flexible paid time away
- Employee, friends, and family discounts
- Medical, dental, vision, and life coverage
- 24/7 Medical Hotline
- 401(k) with employer match
- Employee Resource Groups
- Quarterly Innovation Weeks
- Flexible spending accounts
- Annual bonus, short- and long-term incentives, and program-specific awards may be available
Stand Out From the Crowd
Upload your resume and get instant feedback on how well it matches this job.
What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Principal
