Principal Software Engineer

About the Role:
We need someone passionate about application architecture. Not the kind that just handles thousands of users, we’re talking about the best engineering organizations in the world relying on our platform for FinOps… and our systems not breaking a sweat.

CloudZero's application teams power everything our customers interact with: IAM, cost exploration and allocation, and the platform architecture that ties everything together. Our customers depend on real-time, performant access to their cost intelligence to make decisions. We've built something unique: a fully serverless, service-oriented architecture that delivers complex cost analytics while maintaining sub-second response times.

But here's the thing, we're scaling fast. The architecture that got us here might not be the one that gets us where we're going. We need someone who's pushed microservice architectures and distributed systems to the edge and lived to tell the tale. Someone who sees the elegance in what we've built, and the limits we'll need to blow past.

What You’ll Do:

You’ll lead the architectural evolution required for CloudZero’s next order of magnitude of growth. This is a hands-on role—you’ll be in the code, shipping real systems, while setting technical direction and raising the bar for how we scale. The problems are complex, the expectations are high, and the opportunity to build something durable and impactful is significant.

Architect for scale and performance

• Design and implement the orchestration, performance, and resilience patterns needed as we add customers and capabilities. Identify bottlenecks, evaluate tradeoffs, and deliver solutions that maintain fast response times and operational efficiency—through caching, service boundaries, or new approaches as the system evolves.

Anticipate and address scaling risks early

• Identify architectural gaps and technical debt before they become blockers. Apply pattern recognition from prior growth phases to help the team avoid predictable scaling pitfalls.

Drive clear, principled technical decisions

• Lead architectural choices grounded in real-world experience and proven patterns. Bring clarity to tradeoffs and help the organization invest engineering effort where it matters most.

Evolve the system without over-complicating it

• Guide the service-oriented architecture to support increasing complexity while preserving simplicity, maintainability, and predictable behavior. Advocate for fewer moving parts, well-defined boundaries, and systems that are easy to reason about.

Mentor and elevate engineering judgment

• Share hard-earned insights on scaling systems, microservices, and distributed architectures. Help engineers develop the intuition that comes from navigating real growth inflection points.

Translate complexity into strategic insight

• Communicate technical constraints and opportunities in a way that informs product and business decisions. Ensure architectural thinking meaningfully shapes company direction, not just implementation details.

What You’ll Bring:

• A long track record building and scaling SaaS platforms in production—making architecture decisions that held up under real customer growth.

• Evidence you’ve helped a platform grow by an order of magnitude (e.g., hundreds to thousands of customers, or comparable scale), and can explain what broke, what you changed, and why.

• Strong depth in service-oriented / microservice architectures, including orchestration patterns and the practical reasons they succeed—or fail—at scale.

• Solid distributed-systems instincts: latency, consistency, caching, resilience, data flows, and operational tradeoffs that show up outside of theory.

• Fluency with modern infrastructure and deployment patterns, including Kubernetes/container orchestration and serverless where it’s the right fit.

• Experience designing and evolving authn/authz systems that scale—balancing security, usability, and performance.

• Clear, trusted communication across audiences—able to translate technical constraints and tradeoffs for leadership without losing the nuance engineers care about.

• Comfort partnering cross-functionally (Product, Security, Infrastructure, and Engineering) to drive alignment and ship.

• Boston-area presence (or willingness to relocate) and energy for building in a high-velocity environment.

• Bonus: experience in hyper-growth SaaS environments (e.g., HubSpot, Rapid7, or similar companies where scale forced constant architectural evolution).

Please note: CloudZero is unable to sponsor employment visas. Candidates must have permanent authorization to work in the United States without the need for current or future sponsorship.