Principal Engineer

What You Will Own

Technical Strategy & Architecture

• Own the multi-year technical vision for messaging infrastructure, ensuring architectural decisions position Weave for scale, reliability, and competitive advantage

• Drive architectural coherence across multiple teams, identifying and resolving cross-system dependencies and technical debt at the platform level

• Lead technical due diligence for major initiatives, including build-vs-buy decisions, vendor evaluations, and platform migrations

Cross-Team Problem Solving

• Identify and solve company-level technical problems that span organizational boundaries—the problems that are too complex, too cross-cutting, or too ambiguous for any single team to own

• Compile information across systems, teams, and projects to develop comprehensive solutions with extensive validation, rollback, and testing plans

• Forecast project costs in time, money, and opportunity cost; account for impacts across the business

Strategic Technical Leadership

• Monitor the industry landscape, anticipate where messaging and data infrastructure are heading, and ensure Weave stays ahead of the curve

• Cut through noise and hype to identify genuine strategic value; advocate for and lead key initiatives that prepare Weave for emerging challenges

• Shape company-wide standards for engineering excellence, observability, and reliability in distributed systems

Mentorship & Organizational Capability

• Actively mentor Staff and Senior Engineers across the fellowship, developing the next generation of technical leaders

• Elevate architectural thinking across teams through design reviews, documentation standards, and hands-on guidance

• Build organizational capability that persists beyond your individual contributions

What You Will Need to Accomplish the Job

• 12+ years of software engineering experience with progressive technical leadership scope

• Track record of leading cross-team technical initiatives that delivered measurable business outcomes

• Demonstrated ability to influence without authority, build consensus across organizational boundaries, and translate technical tradeoffs into business terms

• Deep expertise in distributed systems architecture, including building and operating services that handle hundreds of millions of transactions and terabytes of data

• Proven experience with event streaming and messaging infrastructure (Kafka, Google Pub/Sub, or similar) at significant scale

• Strong background in scalable data stores—both relational (PostgreSQL at scale, Vitess, Spanner) and NoSQL (Bigtable, Redis, etc.)

• Operational experience with cloud-native infrastructure on GCP or AWS, including Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code, and highly available system design

• Solid backend engineering foundation (Go preferred; Python, Java, or C# acceptable)

What Will Make Us Love You

• Experience with messaging delivery systems, carrier/aggregator integrations, or telecommunications infrastructure

• Expertise in data platform architecture: streaming pipelines, data lakes, warehouses, or distributed analytics

• Background in compliance-heavy environments (healthcare, fintech) with experience navigating regulatory requirements in technical design

• Experience shaping AI/ML infrastructure or integrating AI capabilities into production systems

• History of external technical leadership: open source contributions, conference speaking, or published technical writing

• Strong opinions, loosely held—you bring conviction to technical discussions while remaining genuinely open to better ideas

Weave is seeking a Principal Engineer to serve as the technical cornerstone of our Messaging Fellowship—the domain responsible for how 30,000+ healthcare practices communicate with their patients across SMS, MMS, email, fax, and emerging channels. This is not a role for someone seeking a larger individual contributor scope; it's a role for someone who shapes technical strategy at the company level, influences architectural decisions across multiple teams, and solves the hardest problems that span organizational boundaries.

As a Principal Engineer, you will own the multi-year technical vision for messaging infrastructure that processes hundreds of millions of messages and manages terabytes of data. You'll partner with Engineering Directors, Staff Engineers, and Product leadership to ensure our technical decisions position Weave for long-term competitive advantage. Your success will be measured not by your personal output, but by how the organization's technical capability grows through your influence, mentorship, and strategic leadership.

This role requires someone with impeccable technical judgment, the ability to operate in ambiguity, and the character to lead through influence rather than authority. You'll be a visible leader whose approach to problem-solving becomes the template for how engineering operates at Weave.

The Messaging Fellowship encompasses multiple engineering teams responsible for Weave's core communication capabilities—appointment reminders, review requests, missed-call texts, two-way messaging, and the infrastructure that delivers billions of messages reliably at scale. You will work across these teams as a technical leader, partnering with Engineering Managers, Staff Engineers, and cross-functional stakeholders to drive architectural coherence and strategic technical initiatives.