Principal Software Engineer, Data

We are seeking an experienced, product-minded Principal Software Engineer to help take our Town Lake data platform from a fast-growing internal platform into the foundational data infrastructure for the entire company.

As a Principal Software Engineer on the Town Lake team, you will lead technical architecture and drive implementation for services across our whole stack, covering areas such as access control, an ingestion framework, AI-driven data classification, a semantic and governance layer, data product/ELT platform, a dashboarding and query tool, and more.

Responsibilities:

• Define, design and execute strategic technical architecture for highly visible, highly critical data infrastructure at the company.
• Lead the design and development of tools and infrastructure to improve and scale our data infrastructure at Cloudflare.
• Lead the design and development of data pipelines and data products to serve customers throughout the company, including tools to automate delivery of those services.
• Become a subject matter expert across both our data platforms, tools and infrastructures as well as our data itself to guide and enable stakeholders with data needs.
• Work across our tech stack, which includes Kubernetes, Trino, Iceberg, Clickhouse, and PostgreSQL, with software built using Go, Javascript/Typescript, Python, and others.
• Mentor and support junior engineers on the team, reinforcing a culture of exceptional delivery and accountability on the team.

Requirements:

• 8+ years of experience as a software engineer with a focus on designing, building and scaling data infrastructure.
• Proven experience leading technical initiatives in a cross-functional context, working with multiple stakeholders and driving value delivery.
• Extensive experience with data infrastructure at scale, including tools like Trino, Spark, Iceberg/Delta Lake, Kafka, Clickhouse, PostgreSQL.
• Experience designing, building and debugging data pipelines at scale.
• Proficient using backend languages like Go, Python, Typescript, and Rust, along with SQL.
• Excellent analytical skills, with a focus on understanding data and how stakeholders use it to drive value.
• Strong communication skills, especially around articulating technical concepts for technical and non-technical audiences.
• Experience creating and using agentic development workflows and an AI-first mentality.

Desirable Skills:

• Experience with data orchestration and infrastructure platforms like Airflow and DBT.
• Experience deploying and managing infrastructure in Kubernetes.
• Experience with data governance platforms and processes, with a focus on privacy and auditability.
• Knowledge about machine learning models and MLOps.