Senior Principal Engineer, Telemetry & Licensing Systems

Aerospike

80d • $240,000 - $312,000

About The Position

Aerospike is building the core systems that fuel our growth engine, telemetry ingestion, licensing enforcement, entitlement APIs, and usage-based monetization. As Senior Principal Engineer, you’ll set the architectural vision for these platforms, breaking down highly ambiguous challenges into clear, actionable designs. You’ll bring a track record of solving high-risk, high-impact problems and will shape how Aerospike enables product-led growth across self-managed and cloud deployments.

Requirements

• 15+ years of experience in software engineering, with expertise in high-scale, high-performance service-oriented systems.
• Proven success designing and delivering large-scale telemetry, ingestion, or licensing platforms in production.
• Strong experience across cloud environments (AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, containers, microservices).
• Hands-on depth in languages such as Java, Python, Go, or similar, with comfort across multiple stacks.
• Track record of modernizing complex systems and driving initiatives spanning dozens of engineers and global teams.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, able to clarify complexity and influence at all levels.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with observability and incident response tools (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, PagerDuty).
• Industry recognition through open-source contributions, publications, or external talks.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and architecture of Aerospike’s telemetry and licensing systems, ensuring global scale, reliability, and security.
• Break down complex, ambiguous technical challenges into actionable strategies that align system design with company growth goals.
• Define long-term architecture for entitlement services, usage metering, high-watermark billing, and event models.
• Partner with Product, RevOps, and Finance to integrate telemetry and licensing into monetization and adoption workflows.
• Mentor and guide engineers across teams, building alignment on system design and execution.
• Anticipate technical risks in hybrid SaaS + self-managed deployments and define mitigation strategies.
• Drive adoption of observability-first practices across telemetry pipelines and licensing services.
• Participate in a 24x7 on-call rotation, providing senior-level technical leadership during critical incidents.
• Represent Aerospike externally as a thought leader in telemetry, licensing, and distributed systems.

Benefits

• Equal Opportunity Employer
• Dynamic team environment

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Number of Employees: 51-100 employees