The Core Platform team at Sift builds and evolves the foundational systems that power our online services. As a Principal Engineer, you’ll play a critical leadership role in shaping the technical strategy, architecture, and direction of our infrastructure and services platform. You’ll drive initiatives that enhance the availability, reliability, scalability, and performance of our systems—ensuring they are resilient, secure, and aligned with the growing needs of our customers and business.

This role is ideal for a hands-on engineering leader who thrives in solving complex distributed systems challenges, mentors others, and influences both technology and organizational strategy across teams.

What you’ll do

• Provide technical leadership and vision for Sift’s online infrastructure—ensuring it is highly available, performant, and scalable.

• Drive architecture and design of immutable, fault-tolerant, multi-region infrastructure and services.

• Lead the implementation of sophisticated multi-region deployments (e.g., BigTable clusters with regional routing strategies) to meet global customer needs.

• Solve high-scale, high-throughput problems requiring deep understanding of messaging systems, distributed data stores, and real-time computation.

• Guide improvements to developer workflows, CI/CD pipelines, and local development environments to streamline efficiency across teams.

• Architect and build robust internal libraries and platforms for interacting with our core systems—data stores, messaging layers, and infrastructure services.

• Develop proactive monitoring and self-healing systems to improve the resilience of critical services.

• Act as a strategic advisor to engineering teams, providing deep technical guidance on data architecture, service optimization, caching strategies, and scalability planning.

• Participate in and help evolve our on-call strategy, ensuring rapid and effective incident response while reducing long-term operational toil.

• Mentor and coach senior engineers across teams, driving engineering excellence and knowledge sharing.

Technical Stack: GCP, AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes, Vault, Jenkins, Kafka, Airflow, Snowflake, Spark, Java 11, Python 3, Ruby 2.7, Ruby on Rails

What makes you a strong fit

You are a systems thinker who thrives in tackling technical complexity and aligning infrastructure investments with business needs. You’re passionate about building reliable, high-scale systems, and you're equally committed to lifting those around you—acting as a multiplier across teams. Your communication skills, engineering rigor, and product-minded approach help you build trust and drive initiatives from conception to execution.

Key qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in Software Engineering, SRE, or Infrastructure roles, with a demonstrated focus on distributed systems and platform-level challenges.

• Deep expertise in designing, scaling, and operating cloud-native systems on AWS or GCP.

• Proven ability to architect infrastructure as code with tools like Terraform or CloudFormation.

• Advanced programming skills in languages such as Java, Python, or Scala.

• Extensive experience with messaging systems (e.g., Kafka) and distributed databases (e.g., BigTable, Snowflake).

• Strong knowledge of containerization and orchestration technologies such as Kubernetes.

• A track record of reducing operational complexity through automation, observability, and self-healing systems.

• Experience influencing architectural decisions across multiple engineering teams.

• Excellent collaboration and communication skills, with a history of mentoring and cross-functional leadership.

Benefits and perks:

• Competitive total compensation package

• 401k plan

• Medical, dental, and vision coverage

• Wellness reimbursement

• Education reimbursement

• Flexible time off

Our interview process

• Introduction interview: a 30-minute session with a recruiter to discuss your background and the role.

• Hiring Manager interview: a 60-minute interview with the hiring manager to explore your fit for the position.

• Virtual onsite loop with the team: a comprehensive session comprising four interviews lasting approximately 4 hours, covering system design, coding abilities, deep dive, and values and behavior-based conversations.

During these sessions, you will have the opportunity to learn about company culture, meet engineers or peers from your team, and discuss distributed system problems. You will have time for interesting questions and gain transparency regarding your future responsibilities and the project.

A little about us

Sift is the AI-powered fraud platform securing digital trust for leading global businesses. Our deep investments in machine learning and user identity, a data network scoring 1 trillion events per year, and a commitment to long-term customer success empower more than 700 customers to grow fearlessly. Brands including DoorDash, Yelp, and Poshmark rely on Sift to unlock growth and deliver seamless consumer experiences. Visit us at sift.com and follow us on LinkedIn.