Principal Engineer, Distributed Systems
Overview:
As Principal Engineer in Security Products, you will provide technical leadership for high-scale security infrastructure. You will define architecture, guide multiple teams, and solve complex distributed-system challenges for authentication, authorization, and security services. You'll shape multi-region, four-nines systems with strong data boundaries and reliable operation. This is a hands-on leadership role that blends architectural vision with pragmatic delivery to advance CoreWeave's secure cloud platform for AI workloads. Compensation / Benefitsmedical, dental, vision insurance – 100% paidlife insurancedisability insurance 401(k) with generous matchflexible PTOequity awards and ESPPResponsibilitiesDefine and govern architecture for distributed security systems across multi-region deployment Design fault-tolerant, low-latency authorization and authentication platforms, including STS and API Gateway Lead architecture reviews, capacity planning, load testing, and production readiness assessments Drive security, correctness, and performance tradeoffs with clear documentation and stakeholder alignment Mentor senior engineers, elevate engineering standards, and foster technical leadership Partner across engineering, security, and product teams to deliver cohesive platform capabilities Establish SLOs, observability, incident response, and post-incident learning for critical services Ensure data residency, tenant isolation, and trust boundary design in all security components Provide technical direction for token issuance/validation, key rotation, revocation, and secure service-to-service access Set and uphold technical standards for API design, threat modeling, cryptography, secrets handling, and governance
Key requirements:
- 12+ years in production software with distributed systems and platform infrastructure
- Experience as principal/staff-plus or equivalent technical leader across multiple teams
- Deep expertise in distributed-systems: scalability, availability, latency, consistency, concurrency, replication, failure recovery
- Experience designing and operating security-sensitive or reliability-critical services in production
- Strong software engineering with Go, Java, Rust, C++, Python, or equivalent
- Ability to translate ambiguous requirements into architecture and execution plans
- Proven track record balancing security, correctness, performance, and operational simplicity
- Strong written and verbal communication; ability to influence across boundaries
- History of improving engineering standards and mentoring senior engineersstrong communicationmentorshipability to influence without direct authoritydistributed-systems design (scalability, availability, latency)security architecture (authorization, authentication, policy enforcement)
- Security Token Service (STS) and API Authentication Gateway