Principal Software Engineer

About the Role:

We are looking for a Principal Engineer to shape the architecture of ThoughtSpot's cloud-native, distributed platform and scale it to support our ambitious product vision. You will bring deep systems thinking, architectural expertise, and pragmatic problem-solving to help evolve our platform across reliability, scalability, developer productivity, and security.

This is a strategic, high-impact engineering role where you will:

• Partner with engineering, product, and business leaders to align architecture with long-term goals.
• Mentor and guide teams on best practices and drive org-wide architectural initiatives.
• Lead efforts to simplify systems, scale core platform services, and enhance reliability.

What you'll do:

• Define and drive platform and product architecture aligned to our business and product vision.
• Lead org-wide engineering initiatives focused on velocity, reliability, observability, and simplification.
• Architect for scale, optimise for high availability, cost efficiency, and platform resilience.
• Drive platform capabilities that accelerate product teams: authN/authZ, config frameworks, data privacy, multi-tenancy, CI/CD improvements.
• Champion best practices such as architectural reviews, chaos engineering, canary deployments.
• Deep dive into complex cross-team challenges and guide technical execution.
• Mentor engineers, identify architectural debt, and promote structured decision-making frameworks.
• Actively collaborate with leadership on technical strategy, product roadmaps, and platform direction.
• Foster a culture of operational excellence through automation, observability, and continuous improvement.

What you bring:

• 15–20 years of experience building scalable, distributed systems in high-growth product environments.
• Proven architectural leadership in SaaS platforms, cloud-native stacks, large-scale microservices.
• Demonstrated experience driving engineering initiatives: reliability, uptime, security, simplification.
• Expertise in platform engineering patterns: chaos engineering, canary rollouts, internal developer platforms.
• Strong system & API design, platform reliability, security & privacy principles.
• Hands-on mindset with ability to operate at both strategic and tactical levels.
• Excellent communication & stakeholder influence across product & engineering orgs.