Principal Engineer (L5)

Who we are

At Twilio, we’re shaping the future of communications, all from the comfort of our homes. We deliver innovative solutions to hundreds of thousands of businesses and empower millions of developers worldwide to craft personalized customer experiences.

Our dedication to remote-first work, and strong culture of connection and global inclusion means that no matter your location, you’re part of a vibrant team with diverse experiences making a global impact each day. As we continue to revolutionize how the world interacts, we’re acquiring new skills and experiences that make work feel truly rewarding. Your career at Twilio is in your hands.

.

Hiring and how we work

We use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help make our hiring process efficient. That said, every hiring decision is made by real Twilions!

Also, while we are a remote-first company, you may be asked to report in person on an ad-hoc basis for team gatherings, functional off-sites or customer meetings.

.

See yourself at Twilio

Join the team as our next Principal engineer (L5) on Twilio’s Segment, Data Pipelines team.

About the job

As a Principal Engineer on the Twilio Segment Data platform/pipelines team, you won’t just design systems—you will be the design anchor for data platforms that processes hundreds of thousands of data points per second. We are looking for a visionary, deeply inquisitive engineer who has built 0-1 architectures, scaled them to global proportions, and collected the battle scars that come from pushing cloud-native systems to their absolute limits. You will guide our engineering organization through complex distributed design choices, ensuring reliability, performance, and cost-efficiency while querying petabytes of data for the world's leading Customer Data Platform (CDP). If you are naturally curious, obsessed with knowing exactly how systems break under intense load, and eager to pioneer the integration of AI into real-world data processing, this is your ultimate playground.

Responsibilities

In this role, you’ll:

• Own the technical north star and deliver robust, highly composable routing experiences for the core Data platform and pipelines at Twilio Segment.

• Design and pioneer always-available, fault-tolerant distributed systems in cloud environments, using past system failures to design out-of-the-box resilience.

• Lead through technical influence, masterfully guiding high-stakes design decisions and articulating the precise trade-offs between cost, performance, and reliability to both engineers and executives.

• Translate complex technical strategies into clear, elegant, and actionable blueprints that align diverse stakeholders, including Product Managers, Architects, and engineering teams.

• Actively prototype and experiment, bringing an inquisitive mindset to the platform by identifying where emerging AI technologies and LLMs can solve systemic data processing challenges.

Qualifications

Twilio values diverse experiences from all kinds of industries, and we encourage everyone who meets the required qualifications to apply. If your career is just starting or hasn't followed a traditional path, don't let that stop you from considering Twilio. We are always looking for people who will bring something new to the table!

*Required:

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.

• 12+ years of programming experience. Deep battle-tested experience with high-scale messaging/streaming systems and distributed processing engines (handling several thousand events/sec minimum).

• Mastery of high-level service design, with a proven ability to model complex interfaces and internals in a properly modular, composable, and extensible way.

• Expert programming experience in Go or similar concurrent, object-oriented languages, with a sharp eye for performance bottlenecks....