Top Principal Software Engineer Jobs in San Francisco, CA

Lead the architecture and development of a production Agentic SOC that uses LLM-based agents to investigate security signals, gather evidence, make defensible decisions, and support SOC analysts. Own agent behavior, tool use, evaluation, guardrails, tenant isolation, auditability, reliability, and autonomous decision-making. Collaborate with analysts, detection engineers, product, and engineering teams while providing technical leadership and mentoring. Build scalable backend systems using distributed workflows, queues, cloud infrastructure, and data stores.

Design, develop, deploy, and operate cloud-scale Azure regional networking infrastructure spanning router hardware, operating systems, optical transceivers, and distributed orchestration systems. Lead architecture and cross-team technical initiatives, write maintainable code, improve reliability, observability, performance, and automation, apply AI-driven engineering practices, and mentor engineers while collaborating with hardware, supply chain, datacenter operations, research, vendors, and senior leaders.

Own the architecture, implementation, and operational excellence of major Azure Boost DPU software components. Develop low-level systems software spanning operating systems, virtualization, networking, storage, device management, and hardware interfaces. Lead complex cross-functional initiatives, optimize hyperscale performance and reliability, resolve system-level issues, establish engineering practices, influence platform architecture, and mentor engineers across Azure infrastructure teams.

Lead design and build of production-ready cloud and AI systems, prioritize security and reliability, ship solutions quickly using modern engineering practices, collaborate with cross-functional teams, mentor engineers, drive customer adoption, and deliver reusable assets and end-to-end complex deliveries.

Leads hands-on modernization of Pearson’s content platform, including large-scale migrations, shared platform services, APIs, AI capabilities, cloud infrastructure, security, reliability, and technical roadmaps. Designs and delivers complex systems, writes production code, resolves high-impact incidents, evaluates technologies, and establishes engineering standards. Mentors senior engineers, influences cross-functional stakeholders, and drives initiatives from exploration through launch while balancing scalability, cost, maintainability, and risk.

Lead the architecture and technical direction of Forward Financing’s core fintech platform. Design scalable distributed backend systems, guide cross-team initiatives, establish engineering best practices, resolve incidents, and mentor engineers. The role owns the technical roadmap and architectural vision while partnering across teams to improve reliability, observability, code quality, and delivery. Ruby on Rails expertise is required, along with strong communication, influence, agile development experience, and a broad backend or full-stack perspective.

Lead design and implementation of Azure full‑stack, scalable skilling platform features. Drive CI/CD, reliability, automation, and AI/LLM-enabled capabilities. Mentor engineers, enforce engineering best practices, coordinate cross-team dependencies, and improve test automation and observability for enterprise-scale services.

Develop and operate production AI framework components, runtimes, benchmarking systems, performance tools, and integrations. Benchmark and optimize large language model training and inference across GPUs and Microsoft hardware, build automation and observability, investigate cross-stack performance and reliability issues, and deliver scalable platform improvements. Principal engineers additionally set technical direction, lead multi-team initiatives, define architectures, and mentor technical leaders.

Lead the rearchitecture and development of a cloud-native Banking as a Service platform. Design scalable APIs, microservices, event-driven systems, and partner integrations using modern cloud, DevOps, observability, and security practices. Drive architectural strategy, technical debt reduction, incident response, code quality, compliance, and continuous delivery. Mentor engineers, collaborate with product and architecture teams, evaluate emerging technologies, and own capabilities through project delivery.

Provides technical leadership on complex, high-impact engineering projects from design through launch. The role involves architecture, company-wide initiatives, engineering excellence, mentoring technical leaders, and establishing standards for scalable, reliable, secure, observable systems. The engineer will collaborate across teams, communicate complex technical topics, and apply customer-focused decision-making and A/B testing techniques.

Lead backend architecture and deliver reusable solutions, unblock engineering teams across the development lifecycle, drive complex design and bug fixes, set code review standards, mentor engineers, collaborate on company-wide projects, and make technical decisions balancing correctness, performance, and customer impact.

Principal Software Engineer responsible for hands-on development, architectural evolution, modernization, and resolution of complex technical problems across a mature education technology product. The role provides cross-team technical leadership, guides architecture and integrations, mentors senior engineers, and applies pragmatic AI-assisted development. Success involves improving system maintainability, enabling product evolution, surfacing technical risks, and strengthening organizational engineering capabilities.

Lead technical direction and hands-on development for OpenAI’s plugin ecosystem. Design APIs, SDKs, and backend services; improve plugin discovery, creation, execution, reliability, permissions, and admin controls; and enhance model-tool interactions. Partner with Product, Design, Research, Security, and Trust & Safety to deliver intuitive, dependable experiences across ChatGPT and Codex while mentoring engineers and guiding complex cross-team initiatives.

Lead technical direction and hands-on, end-to-end development of ChatGPT learning experiences. Build polished interfaces, scalable backend services, APIs, and multimodal capabilities spanning text, images, voice, and interactive experiences. Partner with product, design, research, and platform teams to define products, make architecture decisions, improve reliability and usability, and guide initiatives from concept through launch. Mentor engineers and help expand access to AI-powered education.

Lead the architecture and strategy for onboard GPU execution in Zoox autonomous vehicles. Define GPU scheduling, multi-tenancy, isolation, deterministic latency, compute budgets, hardware selection, and inference performance direction. Drive end-to-end reductions in latency, utilization, power, and cost across models, runtimes, middleware, and hardware. Provide technical leadership, mentor senior engineers, align cross-functional teams, and lead platform bring-up and performance optimization.

Lead the technical direction, architecture, development, testing, and global deployment of NVIDIA’s AI agent compute and virtual desktop platforms. Build secure, isolated, cloud-hosted compute services across AWS and Azure, and drive desktop streaming performance for GPU and general-purpose workloads. Partner with engineering, IT, and security leaders to develop a multi-year platform roadmap supporting AI agents and end users.

Lead architecture and roadmap for Azure PostgreSQL systems; design and review scalable, maintainable database engine features (query processing, storage, transaction logging, recovery, versioning, IO, scale-out). Influence coding standards and run code reviews, write proof-of-concept or production code, contribute to open-source PostgreSQL/Linux, and participate in rotational on-call operations.

Serve as technical lead between NVIDIA and hyperscale CSPs on GPU firmware and system software. Drive firmware update orchestration, recovery procedures, multi-GPU coordination, telemetry/health monitoring, and incorporate CSP feedback into NVIDIAs roadmap to improve fleet-scale manageability and reliability.

Lead technical engagements with cloud service providers on rack-scale system software and firmware. Drive architecture alignment, integration readiness, error handling and recovery, health telemetry, firmware orchestration, and serviceability. Capture CSP feedback, influence NVIDIA system software design, improve tooling and tests, and mitigate execution risks through early collaboration.

Architects scalable distributed systems and low-level cloud platform services, establishes engineering standards and SLOs, designs CI/CD and deployment safety pipelines, leads complex incident escalations and postmortems, and mentors engineering teams. The role requires full-stack, API, and microservices development in Linux or Unix environments, strong SRE expertise, architectural leadership, and US citizenship with eligibility for security clearance.

Leads software design and development for Windows Core OS services and platforms. Partners with stakeholders to define requirements, identifies dependencies, creates design documents, and mentors engineers in producing maintainable code. Drives cross-product project and release planning, serves as a designated responsible individual, participates in on-call operations, and improves system availability, reliability, observability, efficiency, and performance.

Staff and Principal Software Engineers will own large technical domains end to end, making architecture decisions, building scalable backend systems, improving reliability and performance, and collaborating with product, leadership, and customers. Responsibilities include mentoring engineers, driving cross-team technical decisions, and shipping production solutions. Potential areas include AI telemetry, billing ingestion, cloud data infrastructure, integrations, identity, cost optimization, and customer-facing applications.

Leads architecture, hands-on software development, deployment, and production issue resolution for strategic customer projects. Drives AI innovation, platform resiliency, security, observability, performance, and operational improvements. Partners with executives, engineering, product, and customer success teams to prioritize strategic programs, improve customer value, share technical best practices, and remove production blockers.

Provides technical leadership for Azure cloud-scale distributed data platforms processing network telemetry and operational data. Defines architecture and long-term technical strategy, leads streaming and batch system design, resolves complex scalability and reliability challenges, oversees production readiness and continuous improvement, and influences cross-team technical investments. Partners across Azure Networking, conducts design reviews, establishes reusable engineering patterns, improves observability and quality, and mentors engineers and technical leaders.

Principal frontend-focused software engineer responsible for leading frontend architecture, standards, tooling, accessibility, performance, testing, and deployment practices. The role delivers scalable customer-facing web applications, component libraries, and design systems using React or Angular. It includes cross-functional product collaboration, technical decision-making, mentoring, modernization initiatives, and occasional full-stack work. The position is remote, requires U.S. citizenship, Public Trust 6C eligibility, and approximately 0–10% business travel.