Principal Engineer (L5), Segment Data Platform

Twilio Segment is the customer data platform side of the business, and this role sits on its data platform and pipelines team building systems that process several hundred thousand data points per second. You would lead development of high scale ingestion and data processing systems, and guide the team designing, operating and maintaining complex distributed systems, balancing reliability, performance and cost while querying petabytes of data. The posting asks for expert programming in Go or a similar language, hands on experience with high scale messaging and streaming systems, and excellent high level service design, meaning modelling interfaces and internals in a modular, composable and extensible way. One requirement stands out as current rather than boilerplate: demonstrated experience identifying, prototyping and deploying GenAI or LLM solutions to solve real engineering or data processing problems. Twilio publishes no years figure for this role, so we have marked it not stated.

What the posting requires. Twilio publishes no years of experience figure here, so measure yourself against the skills:
- A Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related field.
- Hands on experience with high scale messaging and streaming systems and processing engines, at several thousand events per second.
- Excellent high level service design skills: modelling interfaces and internals in a properly modular, composable and extensible way.
- Expert programming experience in Go or a similar object oriented language.
- Demonstrated experience identifying, prototyping and deploying GenAI or LLM solutions to solve real world engineering or data processing challenges.
- Technical depth in distributed systems, high scale ingestion and cloud native architecture.
- Excellent communication, problem solving and operational excellence skills.

Desired rather than required:
- Proficiency with datastores, distributed caching and container technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes.
- Experience with modern CI/CD pipelines and observability tools such as Datadog, Grafana and Prometheus.
- Familiarity with AI and ML technologies.
- Experience managing and operating AWS infrastructure.
- Experience working in a geographically distributed team.

What the work actually looks like:
- Own and deliver robust, high scale routing experiences for the Twilio Segment data platform and pipelines team.
- Architect and operate always available, complex distributed systems in cloud environments.
- Guide technical decisions, articulating trade offs between cost, performance and reliability.
- Translate complex technical strategies into actionable plans for stakeholders including product managers and architects.

⚠️ Location, and this one has a real restriction: the role is remote but based in India **only in Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Telangana and Delhi**. If you live outside those five states you are not eligible, which is unusual and easy to miss. The posting also says you may be required to travel occasionally for project or team meetings.

Benefits stated in the posting: competitive pay, generous time off, parental and wellness leave, healthcare and a retirement savings programme, varying by location.

Honest fit guidance: Twilio says it values non traditional career paths and encourages anyone meeting the required qualifications to apply. That said, Principal at Twilio is a senior individual contributor level and the scale described, several hundred thousand data points per second, is the real context. The posting also notes Twilio uses AI in its hiring process, with every hiring decision made by a person.