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CloudZero · 8 hours ago

Principal Software Engineer

Boston, MA

Full-time

Onsite

Lead/Staff

CloudZero is a company focused on providing a platform for FinOps that enables real-time access to cost intelligence. They are seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead the architectural evolution of their system, ensuring scalability and performance while mentoring engineering teams and making strategic technical decisions.

Cloud ComputingCloud ManagementDeveloper ToolsDevOpsMachine LearningSaaSSoftware

No H1B

Responsibilities

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

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

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

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

Share hard-earned insights on scaling systems, microservices, and distributed architectures. Help engineers develop the intuition that comes from navigating real growth inflection points

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