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CloudZero · 23 hours ago

Principal Software Engineer

Boston

Full-time

Onsite

Lead/Staff

$170K/yr - $220K/yr

CloudZero is a company focusing on scaling its application architecture for FinOps. They are seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead the architectural evolution, ensuring systems can handle growth while maintaining performance and efficiency.

Cloud ComputingCloud ManagementDeveloper ToolsDevOpsMachine LearningSaaSSoftware

No H1B

Responsibilities

You’ll lead the architectural evolution required for CloudZero’s next order of magnitude of growth

Architect for scale and performance

Design and implement the orchestration, performance, and resilience patterns needed as we add customers and capabilities

Identify bottlenecks, evaluate tradeoffs, and deliver solutions that maintain fast response times and operational efficiency—through caching, service boundaries, or new approaches as the system evolves

Anticipate and address scaling risks early

Identify architectural gaps and technical debt before they become blockers

Apply pattern recognition from prior growth phases to help the team avoid predictable scaling pitfalls

Drive clear, principled technical decisions

Lead architectural choices grounded in real-world experience and proven patterns

Bring clarity to tradeoffs and help the organization invest engineering effort where it matters most

Evolve the system without over-complicating it

Guide the service-oriented architecture to support increasing complexity while preserving simplicity, maintainability, and predictable behavior

Advocate for fewer moving parts, well-defined boundaries, and systems that are easy to reason about

Mentor and elevate engineering judgment

Share hard-earned insights on scaling systems, microservices, and distributed architectures

Help engineers develop the intuition that comes from navigating real growth inflection points

Translate complexity into strategic insight

Communicate technical constraints and opportunities in a way that informs product and business decisions

Ensure architectural thinking meaningfully shapes company direction, not just implementation details

Qualification

SaaS platform architectureMicroservice architecturesDistributed systemsKubernetesServerless architectureAuthn/authz systemsMentoring engineersClear communicationCross-functional collaboration

Required

A long track record building and scaling SaaS platforms in production—making architecture decisions that held up under real customer growth

Evidence you've helped a platform grow by an order of magnitude (e.g., hundreds to thousands of customers, or comparable scale), and can explain what broke, what you changed, and why

Strong depth in service-oriented / microservice architectures, including orchestration patterns and the practical reasons they succeed—or fail—at scale

Solid distributed-systems instincts: latency, consistency, caching, resilience, data flows, and operational tradeoffs that show up outside of theory

Fluency with modern infrastructure and deployment patterns, including Kubernetes/container orchestration and serverless where it's the right fit

Experience designing and evolving authn/authz systems that scale—balancing security, usability, and performance

Clear, trusted communication across audiences—able to translate technical constraints and tradeoffs for leadership without losing the nuance engineers care about

Comfort partnering cross-functionally (Product, Security, Infrastructure, and Engineering) to drive alignment and ship

Boston-area presence (or willingness to relocate) and energy for building in a high-velocity environment