Principal Software Engineer

Principal Software Engineer

As a Principal Software Engineer, you will get to explore and work with cutting-edge technologies and a large and rich data set. If you like working on tough problems, whether that's building systems that handle millions of customer requests a day or how to make sense of over a billion pieces of potentially correlated data, ZoomInfo is the right place for you.

You will define multi-quarter technical strategy and target architecture across multiple squads, raise the engineering bar for distributed systems and Node.js/NestJS services, and drive operational excellence in production.

What You'll Do

• Define multi-quarter technical strategy and target architecture across multiple squads; lead design councils and author ADRs for cross-cutting decisions.
• Establish and enforce org-wide engineering standards and API governance (versioning, deprecation, pagination, caching, security).
• Own architecture and operations for high-throughput, low-latency backend services in Node.js/NestJS, including clear SLAs and performance budgets for critical APIs.
• Set and enforce performance budgets for key services; drive systemic improvements via profiling, benchmarking, caching strategies, and optimized data access patterns.
• Own reliability for critical user journeys; define SLOs/SLIs/error budgets, implement canary/blue-green rollouts, circuit breakers, autoscaling, and lead blameless postmortems.
• Lead the design and operation of event-driven architectures and streaming pipelines (Kafka/Pub/Sub): partitioning strategy, consumer groups and lag management, backpressure, DLQs, retries, and idempotent processing.
• Apply distributed systems patterns (saga, outbox, eventual consistency) to ensure correctness, resilience, and observability across microservices.
• Build and govern shared backend/platform components and, where relevant, reusable frontend/design system assets (monorepo strategy, shared libraries, Storybook) to accelerate delivery across teams.
• Elevate developer experience: standardized CI/CD pipelines with quality gates (lint/typecheck/tests/coverage), artifact provenance/SBOM, SAST/DAST, and secure supply chain practices.
• Drive observability standards using OpenTelemetry; publish golden-signal dashboards and alerts aligned to business SLOs and use telemetry to drive concrete improvements.
• Architect resilient, cost-aware cloud topologies in AWS/GCP (multi-region/zone, least-privilege IAM); guide IaC with Terraform/CDK and Kubernetes best practices.
• Optimize data access patterns across MongoDB/Redis and at least one relational database (e.g., Postgres/MySQL): query planning, indexing strategies, sharding, TTL/eviction, caching layers; ensure data consistency and idempotency in distributed flows.
• Make pragmatic build-vs-buy decisions; evaluate and introduce technologies with a clear ROI and deprecation plan for legacy systems.
• Partner with Product, Security, SRE, and Data teams to craft roadmaps, sequence risks, and land multi-team initiatives on schedule.
• Mentor and multiply senior/staff engineers; lead design reviews, create growth plans, calibrate hiring loops, and raise the engineering bar.

What You Bring

• 12+ years in software engineering, including 7+ years with Node.js/TypeScript (preferably NestJs) and a track record of owning architecture for multiple backend systems or a product area; experience with React and modern frontend stacks is a strong plus.
• Deep expertise in backend and distributed systems: high-throughput, low-latency services, data modeling, microservices boundaries, and event-driven architectures; familiarity with frontend performance (Core Web Vitals, SSR/SSG), accessibility (WCAG), and enterprise-grade design systems is a plus.
• Strong hands-on experience with data streaming and event-driven systems (Kafka/Pub/Sub): partitioning, consumer lag, rebalancing, backpressure, DLQs, retries, ordering guarantees, and idempotent processing.
• Strong API design and governance for REST/GraphQL: schema evolution, versioning strategy, caching, pagination, and contract testing across multiple clients and services.
• Production experience with datastores including MongoDB, Redis, and at least one relational database: query planning/explain plans, indexing and sharding strategies, TTL/eviction, caching layers, and diagnosing performance regressions.
• Cloud-native at scale on AWS/GCP: Kubernetes, Docker, service mesh patterns, API gateways, edge/CDN performance and security; IaC with Terraform/CDK.
• Production reliability leadership: SLO/SLI/error budgets, incident response coordination, chaos testing, capacity planning, and running high-severity incidents for critical services.
• Observability: metrics, structured logging, and distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry) with the ability to derive action from telemetry and lead deep-dive performance/debugging investigations.
• Security-first mindset: OWASP, OAuth/OIDC, secret management, dependency hygiene/supply-chain security; familiarity with SOC2/ISO/GDPR/CCPA practices.
• Developer productivity at scale: monorepo tooling (Nx/Turborepo), code ownership models, module federation; standardized CI/CD with quality gates.
• Cost stewardship: demonstrated ability to model and optimize cloud spend with clear guardrails and dashboards, and to make cost-aware architectural trade-offs.
• Influence without authority; excellent written and verbal communication; proven mentorship of senior/staff engineers and participation in hiring rubric design.

Bonus

• Experience with advanced Kafka/streaming use cases, API gateways, federated GraphQL, visual regression/e2e testing at scale, and applying saga/outbox patterns in production systems.