Principal Engineer (L5)
Twilio · Posted Nov 2
Cloud-based customer engagement platform providing APIs for messaging, voice, email, and customer data orchestration
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About the role
Twilio Segment's Data Pipelines team builds the Customer Data Platform that processes hundreds of thousands of data points per second, querying petabytes of data for leading businesses. The team designs always-available, fault-tolerant cloud-native distributed systems and is exploring how AI and LLMs can solve systemic data processing challenges. As a Principal Engineer (L5), this role serves as the design anchor for the data platform, owning the technical north star, guiding high-stakes architecture trade-offs, and prototyping emerging AI technologies.
What you will do
- Own the technical north star and deliver robust, highly composable routing experiences for the core Data platform and pipelines at Twilio Segment.
- Design and pioneer always-available, fault-tolerant distributed systems in cloud environments, using past system failures to design out-of-the-box resilience.
- Lead through technical influence, masterfully guiding high-stakes design decisions and articulating the precise trade-offs between cost, performance, and reliability to both engineers and executives.
- Translate complex technical strategies into clear, elegant, and actionable blueprints that align diverse stakeholders, including Product Managers, Architects, and engineering teams.
- Actively prototype and experiment, bringing an inquisitive mindset to the platform by identifying where emerging AI technologies and LLMs can solve systemic data processing challenges.
Skills used in this role
What the employer is looking for
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
- 12+ years of programming experience. Deep battle-tested experience with high-scale messaging/streaming systems and distributed processing engines (handling several thousand events/sec minimum).
- Mastery of high-level service design, with a proven ability to model complex interfaces and internals in a properly modular, composable, and extensible way.
- Expert programming experience in Go or similar concurrent, object-oriented languages, with a sharp eye for performance bottlenecks.
- An active "AI story"—demonstrated, hands-on experience identifying, prototyping, and deploying GenAI/LLM solutions to solve real-world engineering or data processing challenges.
- Profound technical depth in distributed systems, high-scale ingestion, and cutting-edge cloud-native architecture.
- Superb communication and problem-solving skills, with a natural inclination to mentor others and a relentless drive for operational excellence
Preferred qualifications
- Advanced proficiency with high-throughput datastores, distributed caching layers, and container orchestrators (Docker/Kubernetes).
- Experience with modern CI/CD pipelines and robust observability frameworks (Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus) to predict and diagnose failures.
- Deep familiarity with broader AI/ML infrastructure and data workflows.
- Hands-on experience managing, optimizing, and operating large-scale AWS cloud infrastructure.
- A proven track record of driving technical alignment and collaboration across a geographically distributed engineering team.
Benefits and support
- competitive pay
- generous time off
- parental and wellness leave
- healthcare
- retirement savings program
About Twilio
Twilio is a cloud communications platform-as-a-service company that allows software developers to programmatically make and receive phone calls, send and receive text messages, and perform other communication functions using its web service APIs. The company also offers customer engagement software and a customer data platform, Twilio Segment, to help businesses personalize interactions at scale. Today, it operates as a key infrastructure provider powering digital communications for brands worldwide.
- Industry
- Cloud Communications
- Company size
- 5000-10000 employees
- Founded
- 2008
- Location
- San Francisco, California, USA
- Funding stage
- Public Company
Funding
Public Company · $240M raised
- 2021-07-31Post IPO Debt
- 2018-05-01Post IPO Equity
- 2015-07-31Series E
Leadership
Chief Executive Officer
Chief Financial Officer
Chief Administrative Officer
President, Twilio Segment / Chief Revenue Officer
Chief Marketing Officer
Recent coverage
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