Principal Software Architect

$250,000 - $290,000/Yr

Arkose Labs - San Mateo, CA

Full-time - Senior

San Mateo, CA

Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services

About the position

Arkose Labs is scaling rapidly, and we're transforming our engineering team to meet the challenges of hyper-growth. We're looking for a Principal Engineer to lead the evolution of our product architecture, with a focus on stream processing and cloud-native distributed systems. If you're passionate about tackling complex engineering challenges, driving scalable design decisions, and mentoring teams to success, this is the role for you.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and evolution of Arkose's product architecture, focusing on stream processing and distributed systems to handle high-volume data at scale.
• Collaborate with engineering, product, and leadership teams to ensure alignment on technical designs and business goals.
• Gain deep knowledge of our product, data flows, and customer use cases to guide architecture decisions with performance, cost, and reliability in mind.
• Provide technical leadership across product areas, mentor engineers at all levels, and foster a culture of innovation and collaboration.
• Take ownership of critical projects, independently driving them to completion while maintaining the highest standards of quality and scalability.
• Bring creativity and a customer-focused approach to influence the strategic direction of our technology and products.

Requirements

• 15+ years in software engineering (or 12+ with a Master's degree), including cloud-native application development and distributed systems at web scale.
• Hands-on experience with stream processing frameworks like Apache Flink.
• Proficiency in Go (Python familiarity is a plus).
• Strong understanding of web/HTTP protocols, DNS, TLS, browser caching, and CDNs (e.g., Cloudflare, CloudFront).
• Proven track record of leading large-scale SaaS product architectures and delivering exceptional business outcomes.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor senior engineers and elevate team performance.
• Adept at balancing high-level business needs with deep technical decisions.
• Familiarity with A/B testing, blue-green environments, and canary deployments.
• Deep experience across architectural reviews, technical design, implementation, CI/CD, and testing.

Nice-to-haves

• Advanced proficiency in Go.
• Experience in cybersecurity or fraud prevention technologies.

Benefits

• Competitive salary + Equity
• 401k plan
• Robust benefits package- 85% medical, dental, vision coverage for employees and 75% for dependents
• Flexible PTO
• Life insurance coverage
• Short and Long Term Disability Insurance paid by the company
• Generous nationwide parental leave policy
• Amazing discounts program
• Wellbeing package including mental health and gym discounts
• Flexible working hours to support personal well-being and mental health
• Employee Assistance Program