Principal Software Engineer (Data Ingest Platform)

Are you the kind of engineer who gets more satisfaction from building a platform that makes other developers 10x more productive than you do from building a single product feature? Do you enjoy designing elegant frameworks and APIs that other engineers love to use? Do you see tough orchestration and scalability problems as puzzles waiting to be solved?

If you're nodding your head, we’re looking for a Principal Engineer to lead the technical vision and architecture of our Data Ingest Platform. This is more than just a job building pipelines; it's an opportunity to own the 'front door' for all the security data that fuels Expel’s services and to create a world-class developer experience for the engineers who build our hundreds of integrations.

At Expel, we’re on a mission to make security easy to understand, easy to use, and easy to continuously improve. The data that flows through our platform is the lifeblood of our security operations, and you’ll be at the heart of ensuring that flow is scalable, reliable, and efficient.

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What Expel Can Do For You

• Give you ownership of a business-critical platform, with the autonomy to define its technical strategy and roadmap.
• Provide a space to solve fascinating, complex problems in distributed systems, platform development, and workflow orchestration at scale.
• Surround you with a passionate, collaborative, and technically brilliant team that values mentorship and learning.
• Offer a tangible and outsized impact—your work will directly accelerate the delivery of every new data integration we build.

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What You Can Do For Expel

• Be the technical visionary for our core Data Ingest Platform, architecting its future to handle ever-increasing scale and complexity.
• Build the tools, frameworks, and developer experience that make our integration engineers wildly successful and happy.
• Lead and mentor a talented group of engineers, driving technical decisions and fostering a culture of excellence.
• Roll up your sleeves and write code for the most critical parts of the platform, setting the standard for quality, performance, and reliability.
• Partner with product and engineering leaders to shape the future of how Expel connects to the outside world.

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What You Should Bring With You

• A deep-seated passion for building platforms and tools that empower other engineers.
• A strong sense of empathy for your users (in this case, other developers!) and a drive to improve their experience.
• Expert-level skills in designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems.
• Professional experience developing in Go and/or Python.
• Hands-on experience with cloud and data technologies like Google Cloud (BigQuery, Pub/Sub) or AWS equivalents (Redshift, SQS, Kinesis), along with databases like Postgres and Redis.
• Specific expertise in workflow or task orchestration systems (like Airflow, Prefect, or custom platforms) and a history of creating frameworks or APIs.
• The ability to lead through influence, communicate complex ideas clearly, and mentor other senior engineers.
• Typically 10+ years of professional software engineering experience.

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How We Run Teams

• We build and run teams where everyone is pulling in the same direction and is learning from each other:
• We work out of a shared backlog
• We peer-review everything
• We pair-program when it makes sense
• We do regular blame-free retros
  

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Additional Notes

The base salary range for this role is between $163,300 USD and $236,800 USD + bonus eligibility and equity.

We believe in paying transparently and equitably. Your salary will ultimately be based on factors such as your experience, skills, team equity, and market data. You’ll also be eligible for unlimited PTO (which we model and encourage), work location flexibility, up to 24 weeks of parental leave, and really excellent health benefits.

We’re only hiring those authorized to work in the United States. We do not currently sponsor immigration visas.

We're an Equal Opportunity Employer: You'll receive consideration for employment without regard to race, sex, color, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status, or on the basis of disability.

We’ll ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please let us know if you need accommodation of any kind.

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