Principal Software Engineer

Cohesity•Santa Clara, CA

11d•$340,200 - $378,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Cohesity is seeking an exceptional Principal Engineer (L8) to lead the architecture and development of next-generation cloud-native services and platform infrastructure for large-scale SaaS and multi-cloud environments. The role will shape the technical vision and architecture for multi-tenant services operating across AWS, Azure, GCP, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, partnering with senior engineering leaders to create scalable, resilient, and secure cloud services that help product teams build and operate software efficiently. This strategic role focuses on complex distributed systems and the future of cloud-native platforms. The Principal Engineer will define platform architecture and technical roadmaps; lead the design of managed, multi-tenant distributed systems; guide cloud-native platforms across compute, storage, networking, and data; and drive production ownership, resilience, disaster recovery, safe upgrades, automation, and reduced operational toil. The role also sets direction for multi-cloud architecture, cloud security and compliance, cost efficiency, and adoption of managed and serverless services. The position works closely with product, security, SRE, and infrastructure teams, influences engineering strategy and architecture governance, evaluates emerging technologies, and mentors senior and staff engineers. Cohesity employees within a reasonable commute of core offices work in-office two to three days per week. Candidates outside the designated job area should apply only if committed to relocating before their start date and legally eligible to work there.

Requirements

15 or more years of experience building large-scale distributed systems, including 5 or more years working with public cloud.
Deep expertise in containers and orchestration, such as Kubernetes.
Strong experience designing cloud-native, multi-tenant SaaS architectures on public cloud.
Hands-on experience designing highly scalable microservices architectures.
Expertise in cloud storage, networking, and compute services, and distributed data platforms.
Strong experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Experience with infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and automation at scale.
Deep knowledge of observability, monitoring, and site reliability engineering principles.
Strong software engineering background and proficiency in Golang, Java, or Python.
Experience building highly performant systems and debugging complex distributed architectures.
Proven ability to influence engineering strategy at an organizational level.
Strong track record of mentoring engineers and driving technical excellence.
Ability to translate complex technical challenges into scalable cloud platform solutions.

Nice To Haves

Multi-cloud experience.
Experience with Terraform, Helm, ArgoCD, or similar infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD tools.
Proficiency in C++.

Responsibilities

Define and drive the architecture and technical roadmap for cloud-native platform services.
Lead the design of large-scale, multi-tenant distributed systems delivered as managed cloud services.
Provide technical leadership across engineering teams and influence organization-wide architecture decisions.
Mentor senior and staff engineers and raise technical standards across the engineering organization.
Architect and build cloud-native platforms spanning compute, storage, networking, and data, with high availability, performance, tenant isolation, fault containment, and resilience.
Design microservices and event-driven architectures using service mesh, API gateways, and managed cloud services.
Develop platforms that enable self-service deployment, GitOps, and infrastructure as code.
Drive end-to-end production ownership, failure-domain design, disaster recovery, safe fleet-wide upgrades and rollouts, automation, and reduced operational toil.
Design multi-cloud solutions that balance common abstractions and cloud-specific capabilities to optimize cost, performance, reliability, and operational efficiency.
Lead adoption of serverless, managed data services, and cloud-native storage and networking.
Drive cloud cost efficiency, performance, and scalability across the platform.
Define cloud security and compliance architecture, including identity, encryption, network isolation, and zero trust.
Partner with product, security, SRE, and infrastructure teams to deliver scalable and reliable services.
Influence engineering strategy and participate in technical reviews and architecture governance.
Evaluate emerging technologies and drive innovation across the cloud-native ecosystem.