Principal Software Engineer, HyperScale Build Platform and Tools

Pure Storage•Santa Clara, CA

1d•Onsite

About The Position

The Hyperscale Line of Business builds and ships products to hyperscale customers at exabyte scale, with an emphasis on speed, reliability, and operational excellence. The Build Platform and Tools team owns the developer productivity infrastructure (build orchestration, build systems, and containerized build environments) that every engineer in the organization depends on daily to build and test software. We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer to set the technical direction for that platform and to solve its hardest problems. You’ll define the multi-year architecture for build infrastructure across the Hyperscale org, lead the highest-ambiguity technical work yourself, and raise the engineering bar of the teams around you. Your success is measured less by what you personally ship than by how much faster the entire Hyperscale engineering organization moves.

Requirements

Software engineering experience, with significant depth in infrastructure, developer productivity, build systems, or platform engineering
A track record of setting technical direction for a platform used by many engineering teams, and of leading multi-team or multi-quarter technical initiatives to completion
Deep expertise in modern build systems and toolchains with dependency management, build-graph correctness, incremental and reproducible builds, remote execution and caching, artifact generation, and build isolation
Hands-on depth with build systems and toolchains such as Make, CMake, Buck/Bazel, or custom/in-house build orchestration tools, including experience evolving or migrating a build system in production
Deep experience with large-scale C/C++ builds: dependency pruning, static/dynamic linking tradeoffs, toolchain management, and reproducible containerized builds
Strong command of Linux-based development environments, Docker, and the operational concerns of maintaining consistent build images and execution environments at scale
Experience designing and operating CI pipelines and integrating build tooling into continuous integration workflows
Demonstrated use of engineering metrics to evaluate and improve build performance, reliability, and developer experience and to make the case for investment
Excellent communication and written design skills, and a history of influencing technical decisions across organizational boundaries
Experience mentoring engineers and raising the technical standards of a team

Responsibilities

Own the technical vision and multi-year architecture for build orchestration, build systems, and containerized build environments across the Hyperscale Line of Business
Make and document the consequential architectural decisions: build system selection and migration, remote execution and caching strategy, hermeticity and reproducibility guarantees, and the tradeoffs each imposes on developers
Drive step-change improvements to build speed, reliability, reproducibility, debuggability, and ease of use across local development and CI workflows
Solve large-scale C/C++ build challenges at their root: dependency graph decomposition and pruning, static/dynamic linking tradeoffs, toolchain and sysroot management, and incremental correctness
Diagnose and eliminate whole classes of build-graph correctness issues, flaky builds, and incremental-build regressions rather than individual instances
Define the standards for containerized build environments - consistent, isolated, reproducible images with a clear lifecycle and upgrade path
Partner with the engineering manager to shape the team’s roadmap, sequence investments, and make explicit tradeoffs between platform work and near-term product delivery
Influence and align engineering leaders and teams across Hyperscale and the broader organization on tooling direction, migration plans, and shared standards.
Set the operational excellence bar for build infrastructure: observability, incident response, change management, capacity planning, and continuous improvement.
Establish the engineering metrics that define developer experience, and use them to justify investment and demonstrate impact
Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, review designs across the team, and grow the technical depth of the organization in build systems and developer productivity
Represent the team in org-wide technical forums, design reviews, and planning; act as the recognized expert on build infrastructure.