Principal Engineer, Inference Cloud

Location: Sunnyvale

We're hiring a Principal Engineer for our Inference Cloud Platform. This team owns the cloud layer behind our Inference Service, including availability, latency, reliability, and multi-region scale.

This is one of the most senior IC roles on the team, for someone who can identify the highest-leverage platform problems, set direction across multiple teams, define long-term architecture, and write production code on critical paths.

Many of the key decisions are ambiguous at the outset; you’ll need to frame the problem, make tradeoffs, and drive execution without a clear spec.

The scope includes multi-region traffic architecture, graceful degradation under bursty AI workloads, high-QPS performance, and the operating model for a platform that needs to remain fast and available under changing demand. You'll partner closely with ML, Product and Infrastructure teams.

Responsibilities

• Problem Definition & Prioritization. Identify the most important technical problems for the platform, often before there's a clear ask. Make explicit tradeoff decisions about what the platform will and won't support, with reasoning that holds up under scrutiny from senior engineering leadership.

• Platform Direction. Set the long-term technical direction for the Inference Cloud Platform, including multi-region topology, failure domains, service boundaries, and system evolution over time.

• Reliability & Performance. Architect active-active systems with rapid failover and graceful degradation (circuit breaking, backpressure, load shedding) with clear SLOs. Drive improvements in latency, throughput, capacity efficiency, and resilience under unpredictable demand.

• Code & Design Reviews. Contribute production code in critical paths, review designs and implementations, and make architectural decisions including build-vs-buy tradeoffs with long-term operational consequences.

• Production Leadership. Lead on the hardest production issues and cross-system bottlenecks. Drive observability, incident response, capacity planning, and post-incident improvement with a high standard for operational rigor.

• Technical Strategy Beyond Your Team. Drive platform-wide decisions across adjacent teams on reliability, API design, capacity planning, and deployment strategy through strong technical judgment. Translate product and business requirements into scalable system designs and drive alignment on shared infrastructure decisions.

• Mentorship. Raise the quality of technical decision-making across teams through design feedback, pairing, and clear engineering standards.

Skills & Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, with substantial individual contributor experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems or cloud infrastructure.

• Deep expertise in distributed systems architecture in cloud environments, including networking, compute orchestration, container platforms, and multi-region production services.

• Strong track record of making sound architectural decisions for highly available, latency-sensitive systems at scale, demonstrated through systems you built directly.

• Experience optimizing latency, throughput, and efficiency in high-QPS systems. Experience with TTFT and tail-latency reduction is a strong plus.

• Strong proficiency in backend or systems languages such as Go, C++, or Python, with the expectation that you can contribute production code directly.

• Experience designing observability and reliability practices, including metrics, logging, tracing, alerting, incident response, and SLI/SLO/SLA-driven operations.

• Ability to influence senior engineers, technical leads, and cross-functional partners through technical credibility, communication, and judgment.

• Experience with ML inference infrastructure, model serving systems, or GPU-accelerated workloads is a plus.