Principal Engineer, Distributed Systems

We are looking for a Principal Engineer to provide technical leadership across Security Products. This is a senior individual-contributor role for an engineer who can define architecture guide execution across multiple teams and solve complex distributed-systems problems in security-critical infrastructure.

The systems you help design will support demanding production requirements: four nines of availability high scalability consistently low latency strong security boundaries and safe behavior under partial failure in a multi-region setup. 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.

Your work will span across high-scale authorization systems anomaly detection systems bot-defense and security token service (STS) API authentication gateway and the shared infrastructure required to operate these capabilities reliably across regions and deployment environments.

You will partner with engineering security infrastructure networking platform product and customer-facing teams. 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.

• Establish architectural approaches for distributed systems - multi-region operation 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 for data residency tenant isolation trust boundaries blast-radius reduction and controlled handling of sensitive security data.
• Define fault-tolerance strategies for dependencies networks regions storage systems and control-plane components including graceful degradation and safe recovery.
• Design systems that meet four-nines availability goals while maintaining predictable low latency and high throughput under normal operation traffic spikes and partial failures.
• Improve the reliability and operability of critical services through SLOs error budgets metrics logs traces audit events alerting incident response and post-incident learning.
• Guide teams through architecture reviews design reviews implementation tradeoffs capacity planning load testing performance analysis and production readiness assessments.
• Mentor senior and staff engineers develop technical talent and raise the quality of engineering practice across the organization.
• Communicate architecture tradeoffs risks and recommendations clearly to technical and executive audiences.
• Lead the design of high-scale authorization systems that support policy authoring policy evaluation access-control enforcement auditability and integration across many services and tenants.
• Provide technical direction for a Security Token Service including token issuance validation lifecycle management trust relationships key rotation revocation and secure service-to-service access.
• Guide the design and implementation of an API Authentication Gateway that provides consistent secure observable authentication and authorization for CoreWeave APIs.
• Set technical standards for API design service contracts threat modeling cryptographic key management secrets handling observability and operational readiness.
• Partner with service teams to make authorization and authentication capabilities easy to adopt through clear interfaces SDKs reference implementations documentation and reliable integration patterns.

• 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.
• Deep expertise in distributed-systems design including scalability availability latency consistency concurrency partition tolerance caching replication and failure recovery.
• Experience designing and operating security-sensitive or reliability-critical services in production.
• Strong software engineering experience with one or more systems languages or backend ecosystems such as Go Java Rust C Python or equivalent.
• Demonstrated ability to move from ambiguous requirements to clear architecture sequenced execution plans and durable engineering outcomes.
• Experience making architecture decisions that balance security correctness performance operational simplicity and time to value.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills including the ability to influence without direct authority and build alignment across organizational boundaries.
• A track record of improving engineering standards mentoring senior engineers and helping teams deliver complex systems safely.

• 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 a Security Token Service identity platform credential service or comparable security-critical control plane.
• 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 with multi-region architecture regional failover active-active or active-passive operation replication disaster recovery and regional isolation.
• Experience reasoning about strong eventual and bounded-staleness consistency models especially for security policy credentials tokens permissions and revocation.
• 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 with Kubernetes cloud infrastructure service networking distributed storage messaging systems and multi-cluster operations.
• Experience building security and platform services with strong observability including metrics logs traces audit records security events and actionable alerting.
• Experience working with enterprise customers regulated workloads or hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

In your first year you will:

• Establish a clear technical north star for Security Products authorization authentication and security-infrastructure capabilities.
• Build strong working relationships with engineering and product leaders staff-plus engineers security teams and the service teams that depend on these platforms.
• Advance the architecture and delivery plan for high-scale authorization systems the Security Token Service and the API Authentication Gateway.
• Improve the reliability performance observability and operational maturity of critical security services against four-nines availability goals.
• Help teams make explicit durable decisions about multi-region design data consistency data residency tenant isolation fault tolerance and security boundaries.
• Reduce duplicated access-control and authentication patterns by enabling consistent well-documented platform capabilities.
• Raise the quality of architecture reviews threat modeling performance testing capacity planning and production readiness across Security Products.
• Mentor senior engineers and help grow a strong technical leadership community.

Security Products is building the systems that make CoreWeave trustworthy at scale. You will work on foundational infrastructure that protects access to cloud resources enables secure product experiences and supports customers running critical AI workloads.

This is an opportunity to shape the architecture of a modern cloud security platform while solving problems at the intersection of distributed systems security engineering reliability performance and global-scale infrastructure.

This position is based in Sunnyvale California or New York New York and requires working on-site. Remote work is not available for this role.

CoreWeave is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to legally protected characteristics.

The base salary range for this role is $227000 to $303000. The starting salary will be determined based on job-related knowledge skills experience and market location. We strive for both market alignment and internal equity when determining addition to base salary our total rewards package includes a discretionary bonus equity awards and a comprehensive benefits program (all based on eligibility).

What We Offer

The range weve posted represents the typical compensation range for this role. To determine actual compensation we review the market rate for each candidate which can include a variety of factors. These include qualifications experience interview performance and location.

In addition to a competitive salary we offer a variety of benefits to support your needs. The benefits below reflect our US-based offerings for full-time employees; for roles in other locations benefits vary and are shared during the hiring process. These include:

• Medical dental and vision insurance - 100% paid for by CoreWeave
• Company-paid Life Insurance
• Voluntary supplemental life insurance
• Short and long-term disability insurance
• Flexible Spending Account
• Health Savings Account
• Tuition Reimbursement
• Ability to Participate in Employee Stock Purchase Program (ESPP)
• Mental Wellness Benefits through Spring Health
• Family-Forming support provided by Carrot
• Paid Parental Leave
• Flexible full-service childcare support with Kinside
• 401(k) with a generous employer match
• Flexible PTO
• Catered lunch each day in our office and data center locations
• A casual work environment
• A work culture focused on innovative disruption

California Applicants

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Equal Opportunity & Accommodations

CoreWeave is an equal opportunity employer committed to fostering an inclusive and supportive workplace. All qualified applicants and candidates will receive consideration for employment without regard to race color religion sex disability age sexual orientation gender identity national origin veteran status or genetic information.

As part of this commitment and consistent with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) CoreWeave will ensure that qualified applicants and candidates with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodations for the hiring process unless such accommodation would cause an undue hardship. If reasonable accommodation is needed please contact: .

Export Control Compliance

This position requires access to export controlled information. To conform to U.S. Government export regulations applicable to that information applicant must either be (A) a U.S. person defined as a (i) U.S. citizen or national (ii) U.S. lawful permanent resident (green card holder) (iii) refugee under 8 U.S.C. 1157 or (iv) asylee under 8 U.S.C. 1158 (B) eligible to access the export controlled information without a required export authorization or (C) eligible and reasonably likely to obtain the required export authorization from the applicable U.S. government agency. CoreWeave may for legitimate business reasons decline to pursue any export licensing process.