Principal Engineer (Distributed Systems)

Join CoreWeave, a leading cloud provider for AI workloads. As a Principal Engineer, you will provide technical leadership across Security Products, defining architecture, guiding execution, and solving complex distributed-systems problems in security-critical infrastructure. You will work across the full lifecycle of these systems, from architecture and technical strategy through implementation guidance, operational readiness, incident learning, and long-term evolution. This is a senior individual-contributor role that requires deep technical judgment and the ability to create alignment, raise engineering standards, and make complex architecture understandable and actionable for others.

• Establish architectural approaches for distributed systems, including service placement, failover, replication, traffic management, disaster recovery, and regional independence.
• Drive decisions around consistency models, caching, invalidation, propagation, revocation, idempotency, concurrency, and ordering where correctness and security are critical.
• Design systems that meet four-nines availability goals while maintaining predictable low latency and high throughput under normal operation, traffic spikes, and partial failures.

• Success in this role requires both deep technical judgment and the ability to create alignment, raise engineering standards, and make complex architecture understandable and actionable for others
• Demonstrated ability to move from ambiguous requirements to clear architecture, sequenced execution plans, and durable engineering outcomes
• Strong software engineering experience with one or more systems languages or backend ecosystems, such as Go, Java, Rust, C++, Python, or equivalent
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to influence without direct authority and build alignment across organizational boundaries
• 12+ years of experience designing and building production software, including substantial experience with distributed systems and platform infrastructure
• A track record of serving as a principal, staff-plus, distinguished, or equivalent technical leader across multiple teams or a broad technical domain
• Experience making architecture decisions that balance security, correctness, performance, operational simplicity, and time to value
• Experience designing and operating security-sensitive or reliability-critical services in production
• A track record of improving engineering standards, mentoring senior engineers, and helping teams deliver complex systems safely
• Deep expertise in distributed-systems design, including scalability, availability, latency, consistency, concurrency, partition tolerance, caching, replication, and failure recovery
• Experience designing or operating a Security Token Service, identity platform, credential service, or comparable security-critical control plane
• Experience designing and implementing authorization systems at high scale, including policy engines, permission models, policy distribution, decision services, enforcement points, or authorization observability
• Experience designing or operating an API Authentication Gateway, service-mesh authorization layer, or centralized authentication and authorization platform
• Experience operating systems with four-nines availability requirements, high request volume, strict latency objectives, and demanding reliability expectations
• Experience reasoning about strong, eventual, and bounded-staleness consistency models, especially for security policy, credentials, tokens, permissions, and revocation
• Experience with multi-region architecture, regional failover, active-active or active-passive operation, replication, disaster recovery, and regional isolation
• Experience designing for data residency, regional data controls, tenant isolation, trust-domain separation, and compliance-sensitive deployment models
• Experience building systems that remain secure and useful during dependency failures, network partitions, regional outages, stale data, degraded capacity, or partial compromise
• Experience with authentication and identity standards such as OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, SAML, SCIM, JWT, mTLS, SPIFFE/SPIRE, or related protocols
• Experience with cryptography, key management, HSMs, secrets management, certificate authorities, signing keys, token validation, or secure credential lifecycle management
• Experience building security and platform services with strong observability, including metrics, logs, traces, audit records, security events, and actionable alerting
• Experience with Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, service networking, distributed storage, messaging systems, and multi-cluster operations
• Experience working with enterprise customers, regulated workloads, or hybrid and multi-cloud environments