Principal Software Engineer

• We are looking for an experienced Principal Software Engineer to own the end-to-end architecture of the platform that manages how our customers are licensed, metered, and billed for their subscriptions
• This platform is the system of record for customer entitlements, usage measurement, overage calculation, and invoicing across the customer lifecycle — spanning finance, sales, engineering, and customer-facing experience
• At our scale, this is fundamentally a distributed systems problem: metering usage in real time across an evolving catalog of consumption-based and subscription pricing models, with strict requirements for accuracy, auditability, and low-latency processing
• You will be the technical anchor ensuring these systems, owned across many interconnected teams, work coherently as one platform
• Define and drive the technical vision and end-to-end architecture for the entitlement, usage metering, overage, and billing platform
• Define and maintain the data model and integration contracts across finance, sales/CRM, engineering, and customer-facing portals — and resolve cross-system risks such as data consistency, latency, and ownership gaps before they surface as production or billing issues
• Design for correctness under business-calendar constraints — billing cycles, dispute SLAs, and reconciliation windows
• Own production reliability for the platform — participate in on-call, guide root-cause analysis, and resolve systemic issues rather than applying one-off patches
• Shape billing and metering strategy for AI-driven products — including token-based consumption, agentic workflows, and MCP-based agent actions
• Guide teams through complex technical decisions and design reviews, establishing architecture standards for changes that touch the shared platform, and mentor senior/staff engineers on system design and cross-team tradeoffs
• Partner with Product, Finance, Sales Operations, and Engineering leadership to align platform roadmap with business needs

Benefits

• Generous family leave
• Matched donations
• Annual learning stipends
• Flexible PTO
• Competitive retirement plan
• Paid volunteer time

• Solid backend development experience in Java, Python, Go or equivalent, used in production at scale
• 12+ years of engineering experience (or equivalent depth), with significant time in distributed systems architecture
• Solid fundamentals in databases and data modelling — schema design, performance tuning, and trade-offs across OLTP/OLAP stores
• Ability to operate as a Principal IC by leading through technical credibility, collaboration, and influence rather than formal authority
• Excellent fundamentals in distributed systems — consistency, fault tolerance, idempotency, exactly-once processing, and stream/batch data pipelines, including high-volume telemetry and event ingestion
• Working knowledge of Kubernetes and container orchestration — deployment topologies, scaling and resource management, and operating stateful services in production
• Proven experience architecting systems that span multiple teams/orgs with independent ownership boundaries
• Domain expertise in billing, licensing, or metering systems, with working knowledge of how these translate across finance, sales, and engineering
• Excellent hands-on engineering ability — comfortable prototyping, validating architectural decisions through code, and contributing directly on critical-path components
• Proven experience architecting systems that span multiple teams/orgs with clearly defined ownership boundaries
• Experience with enterprise SaaS licensing or subscription-management platforms
• Experience with usage-based billing integrations
• Experience designing or evolving pricing/metering models for AI, agentic, or MCP-based products
• Familiarity with M&A technical integration — bringing acquired products’ usage/billing data into an existing platform