Twilio
About this role
Twilio's platform carries an enormous volume of messages and calls worldwide, and this role sits at the architectural centre of it. The posting describes leading the planning, design, development and testing of large scale software systems and new product capabilities, including cloud and internet facing services, then setting technical direction and making sure what ships is secure, compliant and production ready. A Principal Engineer here works across teams rather than inside one service: translating business goals into technical roadmaps, naming the tradeoffs, and driving the resiliency, latency, throughput and cost of the systems. The work explicitly includes establishing SLOs and SLAs, setting standards for testing, CI/CD, observability and security, running design reviews and incident postmortems, and spotting security, scalability and compliance risks early. It is one of the two most senior listings in today's edition, and the twelve year requirement is stated rather than aspirational.
Who this is for
What the posting requires
- 12+ years designing and building highly available, high scale, secure, mission critical cloud SaaS applications in Java, Go or Python
- Knowledge of architectural patterns for mature services, especially distributed and multi regional deployments
- Strong high level service design: modelling interfaces and internals so they stay modular, composable and extensible
- AWS, GCP or another public cloud, with multi region deployment a plus
- Building distributed systems at scale on a microservices architecture
- Extensive REST API design and implementation
- Data architecture experience such as ClickHouse, Lakehouse or Snowflake
- SQL and NoSQL databases and caches
- Familiarity with streaming systems such as Kafka, Flink or Spark
- Container technologies, Docker and Kubernetes
- Modern automated testing and CI/CD pipelines, with genuine ownership of develop, test and deploy
- Strong track record solving complex production issues
What you would actually be doing
- Leading architecture and system design for complex distributed systems, and guiding teams toward maintainable solutions
- Writing and reviewing high quality code for core services, APIs and platforms
- Turning business goals into technical roadmaps and aligning stakeholders on direction
- Improving resiliency, latency, throughput and cost efficiency, and establishing SLOs, SLAs and operational practice
- Driving standards for coding, testing, CI/CD, observability, security and documentation
- Coaching and mentoring engineers at every level, leading design reviews, postmortems and technical deep dives
- Identifying security, scalability and compliance risks early and driving mitigation
Location and working pattern
Remote, but restricted to five Indian states: Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Maharashtra and New Delhi. Occasional travel may be required for in person meetings.
A good fit if
You are an experienced architect who wants breadth across many teams while staying hands on, working remotely from India.
Think twice if
You are below roughly a decade of experience. If you are earlier in your career, the requirement list is still worth reading as a map of what deep distributed systems specialisation builds toward.
- 12+ years designing and building highly available, high scale, secure, mission critical cloud SaaS applications in Java, Go or Python
- Knowledge of architectural patterns for mature services, especially distributed and multi regional deployments
- Strong high level service design: modelling interfaces and internals so they stay modular, composable and extensible
- AWS, GCP or another public cloud, with multi region deployment a plus
- Building distributed systems at scale on a microservices architecture
- Extensive REST API design and implementation
- Data architecture experience such as ClickHouse, Lakehouse or Snowflake
- SQL and NoSQL databases and caches
- Familiarity with streaming systems such as Kafka, Flink or Spark
- Container technologies, Docker and Kubernetes
- Modern automated testing and CI/CD pipelines, with genuine ownership of develop, test and deploy
- Strong track record solving complex production issues
What you would actually be doing
- Leading architecture and system design for complex distributed systems, and guiding teams toward maintainable solutions
- Writing and reviewing high quality code for core services, APIs and platforms
- Turning business goals into technical roadmaps and aligning stakeholders on direction
- Improving resiliency, latency, throughput and cost efficiency, and establishing SLOs, SLAs and operational practice
- Driving standards for coding, testing, CI/CD, observability, security and documentation
- Coaching and mentoring engineers at every level, leading design reviews, postmortems and technical deep dives
- Identifying security, scalability and compliance risks early and driving mitigation
Location and working pattern
Remote, but restricted to five Indian states: Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Maharashtra and New Delhi. Occasional travel may be required for in person meetings.
A good fit if
You are an experienced architect who wants breadth across many teams while staying hands on, working remotely from India.
Think twice if
You are below roughly a decade of experience. If you are earlier in your career, the requirement list is still worth reading as a map of what deep distributed systems specialisation builds toward.
Apply on company site
Opens job-boards.greenhouse.io, the employer's own application page. Applying is always free.