Principal Software Development Engineer – Organization-Wide Technical Leadership
Job Summary:
As a Principal Software Development Engineer at Clearwater Analytics, you will be the technical authority across the organization, with ownership of the overall technology stack, architecture, and engineering best practices. This role is responsible for ensuring Clearwater’s systems meet the highest standards for scalability, reliability, and availability — critical to delivering industry-leading financial technology solutions.
Principal Engineers define and uphold architecture principles across teams, enabling consistent, resilient, and performant systems that scale globally. You will operate as a mentor of mentors, influence product roadmaps, remove systemic barriers, and drive engineering excellence across the company.
This role requires a balance of strategic thinking, hands-on technical leadership, and the ability to inspire and guide multiple engineering groups toward a unified technical vision.
Organization-Wide Technical Ownership
Own and evolve Clearwater’s enterprise-wide technology stack, ensuring it remains modern, performant, and aligned with long-term business needs.
Define and enforce architecture standards for distributed systems, microservices, cloud-native approaches, and data platforms.
Champion scalability, reliability, and availability across all production systems, including disaster recovery planning and high availability architectures.
Scale, Reliability, and Availability Leadership
Establish reliability benchmarks, SLOs, SLAs, and error budgets across services and enforce adherence through governance.
Cross-Team Influence and Alignment
Identify systemic blockers and drive resolution at an organizational level (e.g., cross-team dependencies, architectural debt, infrastructure bottlenecks).
Mentorship and Technical Culture
Clearwater’s tier-0 services operate at massive scale, processing critical financial data that demands uncompromising reliability and availability. As Principal SDE, you will ensure the entire organization's technical foundation is future-proof, secure, and capable of meeting evolving client expectations — from global scalability to instant analytics.
