Principal Software Engineer, Platform

About This Role

We are seeking a Principal Platform Engineer to set technical direction for Vivint's core platform: the cloud services, event pipelines, APIs, and IoT integrations that power millions of connected homes. This is a senior individual-contributor role. You will own architecture across multiple teams, lead the hardest technical problems hands-on, and raise the engineering bar for a growing Seattle team. In this role, you will be responsible to:

• Define the technical strategy and multi-year architecture for core platform services, event pipelines, and APIs.
• Lead the design of high-scale, low-latency distributed systems that process real-time events from millions of devices.
• Own cross-team technical decisions: author and review design documents and resolve trade-offs across mobile, backend, embedded, and data teams.
• Set standards for reliability, security, observability, and operability, including SLOs, production readiness, and incident review.
• Stay hands-on: build prototypes and critical components, and lead resolution of the hardest production issues.
• Identify systemic technical debt and platform risks, and drive plans to address them, including build-vs-buy decisions.
• Mentor senior and staff engineers, help set the hiring bar, and establish engineering culture for the Seattle team.
• Partner with Product, Security, and engineering leadership to align the platform roadmap with business priorities.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field, or equivalent experience
• 10+ years of experience building and operating production systems, including several years as a technical lead at the staff or principal level
• Expert-level skills in Go, Python, Java, or similar backend languages
• Track record designing and operating large-scale distributed systems with high availability and low latency
• Deep experience with cloud-native infrastructure: containers, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and GCP or AWS
• Experience setting technical direction across multiple teams and driving adoption of standards without direct authority
• Strong written and verbal communication; able to explain trade-offs to both engineers and senior leadership

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with event-driven architectures and streaming systems (e.g., Kafka)
• Experience designing REST and/or gRPC APIs at scale, including versioning and backward compatibility
• Experience with IoT systems or device communication protocols (e.g., MQTT)
• Experience with observability and SRE practices (e.g., Datadog, OpenTelemetry, SLOs)
• Experience with NoSQL databases (e.g., MongoDB) and data modeling at scale
• Experience with video streaming technologies (e.g., MP4, HLS, ffmpeg)
• Experience with private cloud or hybrid infrastructure
• Experience building internal developer platforms or using AI-assisted development tools

Working at Vivint:

Learn about the Vivint Culture and why it’s a great place to grow your career!

Here are some highlighted perks you should ask us about:

• Paid holidays and flexible paid time away
• Employee/Friends/Family Discounts
• Medical/dental/vision/life coverage & 24/7 Medical Hotline
• 401(k) + Employer Match
• Employee Resource Groups
• Quarterly Innovation Weeks

WORKING CONDITIONS:

This job operates in a professional office environment. This role routinely uses standard office equipment such as computers, phones, photocopiers, filing cabinets and fax machines.

SAFETY:

Vivint enforces a safety culture whereby all employees have the responsibility for continuously developing and maintaining a safe working environment.  Each new employee is responsible for completing all training requirements.  Additionally, the employee must accept they have responsibility for maintaining the safety of themselves, their co-workers, and the public.  Employee must adhere to all written and verbal instructions, promptly report and correct all hazards or unsafe conditions, question non-standard operations or unmitigated hazards, and provide feedback to management on all safety issues.