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Principal Engineer, Distributed Systems

CoreWeave· Technology
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Hybrid (Sunnyvale, CA / New York, NY)$227k - $303k + equity + bonusfull-timePosted 1mo ago

About the role

Senior individual-contributor role providing technical leadership across Security Products. Defines architecture, guides execution across multiple teams, and solves complex distributed-systems problems in security-critical infrastructure, with focus on high availability, low latency, strong security boundaries, and multi-region operation.

Responsibilities

  • Establish architectural approaches for distributed systems - multi-region operation, including service placement, failover, replication, traffic management, disaster recovery, and regional independence.
  • Drive decisions around consistency models, caching, invalidation, propagation, revocation, idempotency, concurrency, and ordering where correctness and security are critical.
  • Design for data residency, tenant isolation, trust boundaries, blast-radius reduction, and controlled handling of sensitive security data.
  • Define fault-tolerance strategies for dependencies, networks, regions, storage systems, and control-plane components, including graceful degradation and safe recovery.
  • Design systems that meet four-nines availability goals while maintaining predictable low latency and high throughput under normal operation, traffic spikes, and partial failures.
  • Improve the reliability and operability of critical services through SLOs, error budgets, metrics, logs, traces, audit events, alerting, incident response, and post-incident learning.
  • Guide teams through architecture reviews, design reviews, implementation tradeoffs, capacity planning, load testing, performance analysis, and production readiness assessments.
  • Mentor senior and staff engineers, develop technical talent, and raise the quality of engineering practice across the organization.
  • Communicate architecture, tradeoffs, risks, and recommendations clearly to technical and executive audiences.
  • Lead the design of high-scale authorization systems that support policy authoring, policy evaluation, access-control enforcement, auditability, and integration across many services and tenants.
  • Provide technical direction for a Security Token Service, including token issuance, validation, lifecycle management, trust relationships, key rotation, revocation, and secure service-to-service access.
  • Guide the design and implementation of an API Authentication Gateway that provides consistent, secure, observable authentication and authorization for CoreWeave APIs.
  • Set technical standards for API design, service contracts, threat modeling, cryptographic key management, secrets handling, observability, and operational readiness.
  • Partner with service teams to make authorization and authentication capabilities easy to adopt through clear interfaces, SDKs, reference implementations, documentation, and reliable integration patterns.

Qualifications

  • 12+ years of experience designing and building production software, including substantial experience with distributed systems and platform infrastructure.
  • A track record of serving as a principal, staff-plus, distinguished, or equivalent technical leader across multiple teams or a broad technical domain.
  • Deep expertise in distributed-systems design, including scalability, availability, latency, consistency, concurrency, partition tolerance, caching, replication, and failure recovery.
  • Experience designing and operating security-sensitive or reliability-critical services in production.
  • Strong software engineering experience with one or more systems languages or backend ecosystems, such as Go, Java, Rust, C++, Python, or equivalent.
  • Demonstrated ability to move from ambiguous requirements to clear architecture, sequenced execution plans, and durable engineering outcomes.
  • Experience making architecture decisions that balance security, correctness, performance, operational simplicity, and time to value.
  • Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to influence without direct authority and build alignment across organizational boundaries.
  • A track record of improving engineering standards, mentoring senior engineers, and helping teams deliver complex systems safely.

Skills

Required:Distributed-systems designSecurity-focused architectureSystems programming / backendLeadership / collaboration

Benefits

  • Medical, dental, and vision insurance - 100% paid for by CoreWeave
  • Company-paid Life Insurance
  • Voluntary supplemental life insurance
  • Short and long-term disability insurance
  • Flexible Spending Account
  • Health Savings Account
  • Tuition Reimbursement
  • Ability to Participate in Employee Stock Purchase Program (ESPP)
  • Mental Wellness Benefits through Spring Health
  • Family-Forming support provided by Carrot
  • Paid Parental Leave
  • Flexible, full-service childcare support with Kinside
  • 401(k) with a generous employer match
  • Flexible PTO
  • Catered lunch each day in our office and data center locations
  • A casual work environment
  • A work culture focused on innovative disruption
Last updated Sep 16, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About CoreWeave

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