Principal Engineer (L5)

Overview

Principal Engineer (L5) on Twilio's Segment Data Platform/Pipelines team, acting as the design anchor for data platforms that process hundreds of thousands of data points per second.

What you'll do

• Own the technical north star and deliver robust, highly composable routing experiences for the core Data platform and pipelines at Twilio Segment.
• Design and pioneer always-available, fault-tolerant distributed systems in cloud environments, using past system failures to design out-of-the-box resilience.
• Lead through technical influence, guiding high-stakes design decisions and articulating the trade-offs between cost, performance, and reliability to engineers and executives.
• Translate complex technical strategies into clear, actionable blueprints that align stakeholders, including Product Managers, Architects, and engineering teams.
• Actively prototype and experiment, identifying where emerging AI technologies and LLMs can solve systemic data processing challenges.

What you'll need

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 12+ years of programming experience.
• Deep battle-tested experience with high-scale messaging/streaming systems and distributed processing engines (handling several thousand events/sec minimum).
• Mastery of high-level service design, with a proven ability to model complex interfaces and internals in a modular, composable, and extensible way.
• Expert programming experience in Go or similar concurrent, object-oriented languages, with a sharp eye for performance bottlenecks.
• An active AI story: demonstrated, hands-on experience identifying, prototyping, and deploying GenAI/LLM solutions to solve real-world engineering or data processing challenges.
• Profound technical depth in distributed systems, high-scale ingestion, and cutting-edge cloud-native architecture.
• Superb communication and problem-solving skills, with a natural inclination to mentor others and a relentless drive for operational excellence.

Nice to have

• Advanced proficiency with high-throughput datastores, distributed caching layers, and container orchestrators (Docker/Kubernetes).
• Experience with modern CI/CD pipelines and robust observability frameworks (Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus) to predict and diagnose failures.
• Deep familiarity with broader AI/ML infrastructure and data workflows.
• Hands-on experience managing, optimizing, and operating large-scale AWS cloud infrastructure.
• A proven track record of driving technical alignment and collaboration across a geographically distributed engineering team.

Details

• Remote-first role based in any of the permitted 5 India states (Delhi, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Telangana and Tamil Nadu).
• May be asked to report in person on an ad-hoc basis for team gatherings, functional off-sites or customer meetings.
• May be required to travel occasionally for project or team in-person meetings.