Principal Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure

Every day, tens of millions of people come to Solstice Analytics to explore, create, play, learn, and connect with friends in 3D immersive digital experiences– all created by our global community of developers and creators. At Solstice Analytics, we’re building the tools and platform that empower our community to bring any experience that they can imagine to life. Our vision is to reimagine the way people come together, from anywhere in the world, and on any device. We’re on a mission to connect a billion people with optimism and civility, and looking for amazing talent to help us get there. A career at Solstice Analytics means you’ll be working to shape the future of human interaction, solving unique technical challenges at scale, and helping to create safer, more civil shared experiences for everyone. Solstice Analytics's data infrastructure processes petabytes of data daily, powering analytics, ML, and product decisions for a platform serving 200M+ daily active users. As a Principal Software Engineer in our Data Infra org, you will be the primary technical leader driving the strategic vision, long-term architecture, and massive scalability of our distributed data platforms that power Solstice Analytics. You will own and drive the next-generation architecture of our core platforms, which span Kafka, Flink, Spark, Trino, Druid, Airflow and Data Catalog. This role operates under high ambiguity, demanding unparalleled ownership to redefine the limits of infrastructure handling exabyte-scale workloads, and providing a unique opportunity to lead the future evolution of our global data ecosystem. You Will: Define Multi-Year Technical Strategy: Own and drive the end-to-end architectural vision for Solstice Analytics's core data platforms spanning Kafka, Flink, Spark, Trino, Druid, Airflow, and Data Catalog systems. Turn multi-year company strategies into concrete, production-grade infrastructure blueprints. Lead Cross-Functional Alignment: Partner closely with executive leadership, platform governance, data science, and product engineering teams across Solstice Analytics to align technical roadmaps with business-critical metrics. Act as a trusted technical advisor, ensuring centralized infrastructure meets strict platform requirements. Optimize Performance Engine Internals: Deep-dive into distributed engine internals, complex query planning, state management, serialization efficiency, and advanced memory optimization techniques to maximize throughput and cost-efficiency under peak compute loads. Pioneer Autonomous Agentic Interfaces: Spearhead the integration of advanced AI/ML capabilities and large language models (LLMs) within our core data platform to deliver self-serve data discovery, automated metadata generation, and intelligent autonomous interaction layers. Cultivate Engineering Excellence: Set the baseline for code quality, architectural standards, and system robustness across the organization. Mentor staff, senior, and mid-level engineers, fostering a culture of technical rigor, deep-dive post-incident analyses, and proactive chaos engineering validation. You Have: B.S. equivalent in CS or sufficient experience. 8+ years of experience building, designing, testing and maintaining production-grade, large-scale distributed systems. Data Platform Depth: Expert-level mastery and a deep history of building with foundational data technologies within our tech stack: Kafka, Flink, Spark, Trino, Druid, Hive, Airflow, or advanced Data Catalog / Metadata systems. Infrastructure Core Builder: A proven track record of architecting, writing, and deploying core data platform code and distributed systems from the ground up. We are looking for someone who builds the engine rather than someone who just maintains or configures existing setups. You have driven major structural overhauls and 1-to-N platform evolutions at hyper-scale (100M+ active users). Strong Engineering Foundations: Robust proficiency in Java, Go, or Scala , with a track record of writing clean, highly performant backend code. Cloud Fluency: Proven expertise managing, scaling, and troubleshooting complex stateful and stateless multi-cluster data infrastructure running on top of Kubernetes within AWS or GCP. Cross-Organizational Technical Leadership: A proven track record of influencing technical direction across a large engineering organization, leading consensus on complex architectural initiatives, and championing successful multi-quarter projects. Extreme Ownership: A history of radical accountability. You do not wait for clean specifications in high-ambiguity environments; you actively define the technical requirements, unblock dependencies, rally engineers across pods, and steer complex projects from initial whiteboard sketch all the way to production stability. Nice to Have: Contributions to open-source projects in the data infrastructure ecosystem. Experience operating infrastructure at consumer-internet scale (100M+ users). For roles that are based at our headquarters in San Mateo, CA: The starting base pay for this position is as shown below. The actual base pay is dependent upon a variety of job-related factors such as professional background, training, work experience, location, business needs and market demand. Therefore, in some circumstances, the actual salary could fall outside of this expected range. This pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. All full-time employees are also eligible for equity compensation and for benefits as described on this page . Annual Salary Range $295,250 — $345,040 USD Roles that are based in an office are onsite Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, with optional presence on Monday and Friday (unless otherwise noted). Solstice Analytics provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. Solstice Analytics also provides reasonable accommodations to candidates with qualifying disabilities or religious beliefs during the recruiting process. For US based roles only, please note the Company may not be able to employ candidates for this role who have United States work authorization related to certain U.S. visa categories, or support future H-1B sponsorship at this time.