Software Engineering Principal Architect

Airkit

Airkit

Software Engineering, IT
San Francisco, CA, USA
Posted on Feb 6, 2026

Description

We are building the next generation of trusted enterprise computing in the cloud. Our team is fast-paced, metrics-driven, and deeply collaborative, working across the full technology stack. We specialize in transactional systems, distributed systems, and enterprise-grade reliability, availability, and scale.

We are seeking a highly accomplished and energetic Principal Architect to lead the design and evolution of scalable, resilient, and fault-tolerant transactional and distributed systems. This is a strategic, hands-on architecture role with end-to-end ownership of the Transactional Layer Storage and Compute stack.

You will be responsible for shaping and driving the architecture for metadata persistence, log persistence, data persistence, and database compute. These systems are operated and evolved through a control plane that enforces safe change compliance and meets strict Trust SLAs, including resiliency, self-healing, autoscaling, and the seamless introduction of new substrates and features.

As a Principal Architect, you will envision and drive service automation outcomes, ensuring operational excellence at enterprise scale while influencing both technical direction and engineering culture.

Key Responsibilities:

  • Design and evolve highly scalable, resilient, and fault-tolerant transactional and distributed system architectures

  • Provide architectural leadership for transactional storage and compute, including metadata, logs, and database compute layers

  • Drive automation and operational excellence through control-plane-driven architectures

  • Ensure systems meet strict Trust SLAs for availability, reliability, scalability, and self-healing

  • Collaborate across engineering, operations, and product teams to align architecture with business and platform goals

  • Use telemetry and metrics to guide design decisions and continuous improvement

  • Mentor senior engineers while remaining open to learning and feedback

  • Contribute hands-on when needed, including design reviews, code reviews, and critical implementations

  • Required Qualifications

  • Proven experience designing and building scalable, resilient, and fault-tolerant transactional and distributed systems in enterprise production environments

  • Strong leadership and communication skills, with the ability to influence across teams and levels

  • Highly inventive, pragmatic, and delivery-focused, with a track record of incremental, on-time execution

  • Expert-level Java development experience in Unix/Linux environments

  • Deep understanding of object-oriented programming, modern design patterns, and system architecture principles

  • Strong experience using telemetry, metrics, and observability to drive operational excellence

  • High engineering rigor, including writing functional and unit tests and participating in peer code reviews

  • Experience working in Agile development environments with a commitment to continuous improvement

  • 15+ years of professional experience, or a Master’s degree in a relevant field with 12+ years of professional experience

  • Experience with relational databases is a strong plus

*LI-Y

For roles in San Francisco and Los Angeles: Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance and the Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring, Salesforce will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.