
Principal Software Engineer – Platform Architecture, Execution Model
Red Cell Partners
full-time
Posted on:
Location Type: Hybrid
Location: Seattle • Virginia • Washington • United States
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Salary
💰 $240,000 - $290,000 per year
Job Level
About the role
- Architect & lead the core execution model (state machine, lifecycle, resource model, failure semantics)
- Design platform APIs/SDKs connecting workflows, agents, tools, and product surfaces; drive versioning & compatibility
- Guarantee correctness via idempotency, deterministic replays, compensating actions, and data integrity
- Engineer reliability at scale: concurrency controls, rate limits, backpressure, sharding/partitioning, and workload isolation
- Build security & governance into the core: RBAC/ABAC, policy enforcement, fine-grained audit & lineage
- Deliver observability: distributed tracing, structured logs, metrics, and evaluation hooks; build an “explainable trail” of agent actions
- Own quality: design reviews, test strategy (unit, property, chaos), performance baselines, SLOs, incident response, and postmortems
- Mentor & unblock senior engineers; partner with Product, Security, and Customer teams to translate requirements into durable primitives
- Make pragmatic choices on storage, queueing, and compute; create paved roads that accelerate all other teams
- Define system boundaries and reduce cross-service coupling through clear architectural patterns
- Drive platform-wide standards for correctness, reliability, and API design across teams
- Balance short-term delivery with long-term architectural integrity, ensuring the platform evolves without accumulating systemic risk.
Requirements
- 12-15+ years of experience building distributed/platform systems, including significant experience defining architecture across teams or domains
- 10+ years owning mission-critical runtimes or workflow/orchestration systems
- Deep expertise with durable execution (e.g., state machines, event sourcing, saga/compensation, idempotency, exactly/at-least-once semantics)
- Proven track record with security & governance in production systems (auth, RBAC, audit, policy)
- Hands-on with observability (Grafana or equivalent), including trace correlation across async boundaries
- Strong systems design across storage, queues, schedulers, and evented architectures; performance tuning under load
- Excellence in a modern language (e.g., Go, Rust, Java, or TypeScript) and cloud-native stacks (containers, CI/CD, IaC)
- Comfortable operating in regulated or high-assurance environments; bias toward correctness, clarity, and documentation
- Proven ability to influence technical direction across an organization and drive adoption of architectural standards
- Ability to incorporate advance LLM capabilities into system design and platform architecture decisions where appropriate.
Benefits
- Career track opportunity with potential for rapid advancement with strong performance as the firm grows
- 100% employer paid, comprehensive health care including medical, dental, and vision for you and your family.
- Paid maternity and paternity for 14 weeks at employees' normal pay.
- Unlimited PTO, with management approval.
- Opportunities for professional development and continued learning.
- Optional 401K, FSA, and equity incentives available.
- Mental health benefits are available through Tara Mind.
- Cost effective GLP-1 solutions available through Crux.
Applicant Tracking System Keywords
Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.
Hard Skills & Tools
state machinesevent sourcingidempotencysagacompensationobservabilityperformance tuningcloud-native stackscontainersCI/CD
Soft Skills
mentoringcollaborationinfluencingproblem-solvingcommunicationleadershipdecision-makingstrategic thinkingquality assurancedocumentation