Iterable is the leading AI-powered customer engagement platform that helps leading brands like Redfin, SeatGeek, Priceline, Calm, and Box create dynamic, individualized experiences at scale. Our platform empowers organizations to activate customer data, design seamless cross-channel interactions, and optimize engagement-all with enterprise-grade security and compliance. Today, nearly 1,200 brands across 50+ countries rely on Iterable to drive growth, deepen customer relationships, and deliver joyful customer experiences.

With a global presence-including offices in San Francisco, New York, Denver, London, and Lisbon, plus remote employees worldwide-we are committed to building a diverse and inclusive workplace. We welcome candidates from all backgrounds.

The Principal Engineer is a critical, senior leadership role responsible for driving the technical strategy, architectural coherence, and engineering excellence across several key product areas. This role acts as a bridge between high-level business goals and on-the-ground technical execution, ensuring the product is built correctly, efficiently, and with a long-term vision.

• Serve as the technical authority for multiple core product areas, ensuring all architectural decisions directly support the business objectives for those areas.
• Establish and maintain organization-wide technical standards, architectural patterns, and coding best practices to ensure consistency, security, performance, and maintainability across all teams.
• Support decision making by providing expert architectural guidance and data-driven recommendations to leadership and engineering teams, facilitating timely and sound technical decisions.

• Directly mentor, guide, and lead the technical direction of the Tech Leads and senior engineers within the domains, fostering a high-performance engineering culture.
• Oversee and approve key design documents and high-level architectural proposals, ensuring they adhere to organizational standards and the long-term architectural roadmap.
• Act as an escalation point for complex technical challenges, actively supporting teams in overcoming significant architectural hurdles or design issues.

• Pull teams up to give them the big picture and let them see connections: define and communicate the overall architectural vision and strategy to engineering teams.
• Report on roadmap: regularly report progress, risks, and technical insights related to the architectural roadmap to executive and product leadership.

Experience & Technical Skills

• Professional Experience: 10+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 5+ years as a hands-on architect.
• System Design: Proven track record of architecting and delivering complex, high-scale, distributed systems (eg, Microservices, Event-Driven Architecture) in a cloud environment (AWS/GCP/Azure).
• Technical Depth: Deep expertise in our core technology stack: Scala (Java in lieu), Play, Kafka, Flink, Pulsar, S3.
• AI: Experience building or deploying Multi-Agent Frameworks or Multi-Agent Systems.
  • Proven experience working with multiple LLMs (eg, OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere) and understanding their strengths and limitations.
  • Expertise in orchestration software like LangGraph or similar frameworks used for building and managing agent workflows.
• Data Engineering, Pipeline and Storage: Strong experience with data architecture, including SQL and NoSQL databases, caching strategies, and data consistency models. Experience in data engineering and data pipeline technologies. Our stack is Elasticsearch, Postgres, Redis and CockroachDB.
• Operational Excellence: Demonstrated experience with CI/CD pipelines, observability (logging/monitoring/tracing), and DevOps practices. Experience working with consumer-scale systems at enterprise software companies.

Leadership & Soft Skills

• Influence without Authority: Ability to drive consensus across multiple teams and stakeholders without relying solely on hierarchical authority.
• Business Acumen: Strong ability to translate complex technical concepts into non-technical terms for executive stakeholders and product managers.
• Mentorship: A passion for teaching and upskilling other engineers; experience managing or mentoring Tech Leads is highly desirable.
• Strategic Thinking: Ability to balance "perfect" architecture with pragmatic delivery timelines (knowing when to accept technical debt and when to pay it down).

• Experience transforming a monolithic architecture into modular, service-oriented architecture.
• Experience working directly with customers from both a functionality and triaging standpoint.
• Experience working in building messaging/communication platforms at scale.

Iterable, Inc. does not request money, fees, or payment of any kind from prospective candidates. It also does not request personal documents until a candidate signs an engagement letter or employment contract.

Iterable is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer that proudly pursues and hires a diverse workforce. Iterable does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, or religious belief, ethnic or national origin, nationality, sex, gender, gender-identity, sexual orientation, disability, age, military or veteran status, or any other basis protected by applicable local, state, or federal laws or prohibited by Company policy.