Principal Software Development Engineer

Principal Software Development Engineer – Organization-Wide Technical Leadership Job Summary: As a Principal Software Development Engineer at Clearwater Analytics, you will be the technical authority across the organization, with ownership of the overall technology stack , architecture , and engineering best practices . This roleis responsible forensuring Clearwater’s systems meet the highest standards for scalability, reliability, and availability — critical to delivering industry-leading financial technology solutions. Principal Engineers define and uphold architecture principles across teams, enabling consistent, resilient, and performant systems that scale globally.

You willoperateas a mentor of mentors , influence product roadmaps, remove systemic barriers, and drive engineering excellence across the company. This role requires a balance of strategic thinking , hands-on technical leadership , and the ability to inspire and guide multiple engineering groups toward a unified technical vision. Key Responsibilities: Organization-Wide Technical Ownership Own and evolve Clearwater’s enterprise-wide technology stack , ensuring itremainsmodern, performant, and aligned with long-term business needs.

Define and enforce architecture standards for distributed systems , microservices , cloud-native approaches , and data platforms . Champion scalability, reliability, and availability across all production systems, including disaster recovery planning and high availability architectures. Partnerwith CTO, product leaders, and engineering directors to set technology vision and align investment priorities.

Scale, Reliability, and Availability Leadership Drive engineering practices that ensure systems can scale horizontally, handle large volumes of financial data, andmaintainsub-second responses where needed. Establish reliability benchmarks, SLOs, SLAs, and error budgets across services and enforce adherence through governance. Lead initiatives to improve operational excellence , observability , and incident response maturity .

Cross-Team Influence and Alignment Create alignment across divisions toward shared architecture patterns and tooling. Influence roadmap prioritization to address long-term scale, availability, and performance improvements. Identifysystemic blockers and drive resolution at an organizational level (e.g., cross-team dependencies, architectural debt, infrastructure bottlenecks).

Mentorship and Technical Culture Act asa mentorfor senior and staff engineers, enabling them to grow into architectural leaders. Model engineering excellence and continuous improvement — from code quality to deployment automation. Promote a culture of technical curiosity, design rigor, and collaborative problem solving.

Required Skills & Qualifications: Proven leadership in organization-wide architecture ownership for large-scale distributed systems. Expertisein microservices , event-driven architectures , and cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, or GCP). Deep understanding of fault-tolerant design, high availability systems, load balancing, and distributed consensus protocols.

Experience defining and implementing scalability strategies , including horizontal scaling,caching, and sharding. Strong communicationskills to influence stakeholders across engineering, product, and executive leadership. Ability tooperateat both strategic and tactical levels — from high-level architecture decisions to detailed design reviews.

Exceptional analytical skills withfocuson performance tuning andoptimizinglarge-scale systems. Education & Experience: Bachelor’s orMaster’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related technical field. 15+ years of enterprise software development experience with at least 5+ years insenior/principal engineering and architectural leadership. Significant experiencedesigning, deploying, andmaintaining globally distributed systems in production at scale.

Track recordof delivering high-reliability, mission-critical systems with measurable uptime and performance improvements. Why This Role Matters: Clearwater’stier-0servicesoperateat massivescale , processing critical financial data that demands uncompromising reliability and availability. As Principal SDE, you will ensure the entire organization's technical foundation is future-proof, secure, and capable of meeting evolving client expectations — from global scalability to instant analytics .