Principal Core Infrastructure Engineer positions focus on delivering results in their domain. This page aggregates open Principal Core Infrastructure Engineer roles and what employers typically expect.
Prototype, design, and implement a new trusted infrastructure. Define and implement security solutions for new and challenging problems. Design and build security and network mechanisms. Define security and network configuration and implementation best practices. Design, develop, troubleshoot, and debug software programs for databases, applications, tools, and networks. Specify, design, and implement changes to existing software architecture to meet changing needs. Provide technical leadership to other software developers. Leads development and begins architecting components of scalable, elastic distributed systems. Defines and enforces scalability requirements for owned components; optimizes code and data paths for high‑throughput, hyper‑scale workloads; and leverages data plane platforms for large‑scale retrieval, storage, and processing. Designs fault‑tolerant, in‑service‑upgradable systems using redundancy, replication, failover, and policies for partitions, applying load‑shedding, throttling, and rate‑limiting to handle network unreliability while meeting SLOs. Establishes KPIs and telemetry; builds proactive dashboards and alerts; and designs complex validation (fault injection, brownouts), replication, and synchronization for correctness and durability. Proactively diagnoses and resolves production issues, mentors peers, and ensures operational readiness. Implements robust security controls, executes remediation, maintains compliance documentation, and develops IaC and automation that enable safe patching, updates, and rollbacks within change‑management plans. ### Responsibilities Key Responsibilities System Design & Architecture - System Scalability: –Lead the development and implementation, and begin to architect, components of scalable distributed systems that support horizontal and vertical scaling to meet system demands, including leveraging distributed state management tools. –Optimize code and/or systems for large-scale data processing and high-throughput requirements to support hyper-scale systems. –Define scalability requirements for owned components and ensure design and implementation requirements are met. –Design systems to scale with elasticity (e.g., effectively scaling both up and down). –Leverage data plane platforms to effectively handle large-scale data retrieval, storage, and processing. –Design performance and load testing. System Design & Architecture - System Reliability Design: –Build and design fault-tolerant components and systems capable of withstanding in-service updates by implementing redundancy, replication, and automatic failover mechanisms. –Design systems to effectively handle service disruptions (e.g., network partitions) by prioritizing consistency, availability, or partition tolerance. –Implement and optimize approaches to handle network unreliability, including load-shedding, throttling, and rate-limiting. –Design components and systems that are durable and adhere to service level objectives (SLOs), setting expectations for availability and durability of other computing services within the department. System Design & Architecture - System Reliability Performance: –Define key performance indicators (KPIs) and telemetry to identify gaps or issues in running systems. –Build and customize moderately complex dashboards, telemetry systems, and alerting mechanisms to proactively monitor components and system health.. System Design & Architecture - Correctness / Availability: –Design and implement functional and correctness requirements for feature sets and/or systems in new or existing systems. –Design complex test scenarios (e.g., fault-injection, brown-out) to evaluate system correctness. –Implement data replication and synchronization techniques to maintain data integrity and availability. Operational Troubleshooting & Incident Management: –Take a proactive role in diagnosing, debugging, and resolving issues in active components and systems to support ongoing operation, and mentor other…