Career Area

Engineering

Job Description

Your Work Shapes the World at Caterpillar Inc.

When you join Caterpillar, you're joining a global team who cares not just about the work we do – but also about each other. We are the makers, problem solvers, and future world builders who are creating stronger, more sustainable communities. We don't just talk about progress and innovation here – we make it happen, with our customers, where we work and live. Together, we are building a better world, so we can all enjoy living in it.

Role Summary

We're seeking a Principal Software Engineer to build and evolve large-scale, distributed systems that power mission-critical platforms. This is a senior technical leadership role for engineers who thrive on solving hard, ambiguous problems at scale, and who can influence architecture across teams.

You will drive system design, scalability, and engineering excellence, while remaining deeply hands-on in building high-performance backend systems on a modern cloud-native stack.

What You'll Do

Architect and build high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems using Java and microservices
Lead end-to-end system design across services, data, and platform layers
Design for scale, resilience, fault tolerance, and operability from first principles
Build and operate containerized workloads on Kubernetes (multi-service, production scale)
Define and raise the bar on architecture, APIs, and engineering quality standards
Drive cross-team technical decisions and resolve complex system bottlenecks
Mentor senior engineers and act as a technical multiplier across teams
Influence platform roadmap, modernization, and developer productivity

Basic Qualifications

12+ years of experience building and operating backend systems at scale
Strong expertise in Java, Spring Boot, Microservices, Distributed Systems
Proven experience designing highly available, large-scale systems (traffic, data, or compute)
Hands-on with Kubernetes and Docker in production environments
Strong fundamentals in system design, concurrency, data modeling, and performance optimization
Deep experience with PostgreSQL or similar databases

Preferred Qualifications

Experience with event-driven architectures (Kafka / streaming systems)
Exposure to cloud platforms (AWS/Azure) and hybrid architectures
Experience with observability, reliability engineering, and production operations
Contributions to platform engineering, frameworks, or internal developer platforms
Track record of influencing architecture across multiple teams or product

Principal Software Engineer Distributed Systems & Cloud-Native Platform (Java)