Principal Engineer (L5), Twilio Segment Data Pipelines

About the role

Principal Engineer on Twilio's Segment Data platform / pipelines team. You are the design anchor for data platforms that process hundreds of thousands of data points per second, guiding the engineering organization through complex distributed design choices while ensuring reliability, performance and cost-efficiency while querying petabytes of data for a leading Customer Data Platform (CDP). The role suits an engineer who has built 0-1 architectures and scaled them globally, and who wants to bring AI into real-world data processing.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical north star and deliver composable routing experiences for the core data platform and pipelines.
• Design always-available, fault-tolerant distributed systems in cloud environments.
• Lead through technical influence on high-stakes design decisions, articulating trade-offs between cost, performance and reliability to engineers and executives.
• Translate technical strategy into actionable blueprints for Product Managers, Architects and engineering teams.
• Prototype and experiment with emerging AI technologies and LLMs to solve data processing challenges.

Required

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in a technical field; 12+ years of programming experience.
• Deep experience with high-scale messaging/streaming systems and distributed processing engines.
• Mastery of service design with modular, composable interfaces.
• Expert programming in Go or similar concurrent, object-oriented languages.
• Hands-on experience deploying GenAI/LLM solutions.
• Depth in distributed systems, high-scale ingestion and cloud-native architecture.
• Strong communication, mentoring and operational excellence.

Desired

• High-throughput datastores, distributed caching, Docker and Kubernetes.
• CI/CD and observability (Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus).
• AI/ML infrastructure familiarity; large-scale AWS infrastructure.
• Collaboration across geographically distributed teams.

Location

Remote, based in any of the permitted 5 India states (Delhi, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Telangana and Tamil Nadu). Occasional travel.