Principal Software Engineer, Core Experiences (Remote Eligible) at Smartsheet · LumiJobs

Responsibilities

Architect the Sheet Data Platform: Own the end-to-end design for how sheet data is stored, tiered, and served across our transactional databases and our lakehouse platform. That includes data lifecycle and retention strategy, schema evolution, asynchronous access patterns, and consistency guarantees that users and agents can rely on.
Design for People and Agents at Scale: Shape the services and APIs that serve sheet data to a real-time collaborative experience used by millions and to AI agents that read, write, and analyze at machine scale. Make the hard trade-offs between latency, consistency, and cost, and document them so others can build on them.
See Around Corners: Identify the largest technical opportunities and risks across Core Views and the platforms it depends on before they become obvious. Build the prototypes that prove them out and turn them into initiatives leadership will invest in.
Lead High-Stakes Migrations: Plan and execute changes to petabyte-scale production data with zero customer impact. That means phased cutovers, backfill and reconciliation, verification at scale, and a rollback path for every step.
Own Delivery End to End: Scope multi-quarter efforts into phased plans with clear milestones, track progress across teams, raise risks early and candidly, and ship on time.
Carry Architecture Across Org Boundaries: Partner with Product, Data Platform, AI Platform, and Infrastructure to align on direction. Influence roadmaps you do not own, and represent Core Views in company-level platform and vendor decisions.
Set the Standard: Bring industry best practices into Smartsheet engineering. Write the architecture decisions, RFCs, and standards other teams build against, and lead the design reviews that hold them to that bar.
Lead on AI-Driven Engineering: Define the patterns and guardrails for integrating AI capabilities into complex multi-system architectures and into how our engineers build software. Measure the impact so successful practices spread across groups.
Stay Hands-On: Solve complex problems across multiple systems with simple, high-performing code in Java on AWS and Kubernetes. Do deep code reviews across product areas, and mentor senior and staff engineers on distributed systems and data-intensive design.
Own Production at the Deepest Level: Participate in on-call and lead the most complex incidents to resolution. Dig into the internals of databases and infrastructure to find performance bottlenecks, and drive the root-cause work that makes the platform more resilient.

Qualification

10+ years building highly scalableAsynchronous Distributed SystemsLarge Data in ProductionAmbitious ProjectsDirection Others AdoptedLLMs in Real ProductsA degree in Computer ScienceLegally eligible to work in the UDatabricks (Delta LakeBuilding data access for AI agentsReal-time collaborative applicationsCurrent US Perks & Benefits

Required

10+ years building highly scalable, highly available, low-latency systems, including several years operating at Principal or Staff level. You write production-quality Java or Kotlin and can work comfortably across the stack.
Asynchronous Distributed Systems: You've designed and run async, event-driven systems on AWS or comparable cloud infrastructure. You know firsthand where they break: ordering, idempotency, back-pressure, partial failure, and consistency across service boundaries.
Large Data in Production: You've owned systems backed by very large relational or distributed datastores. You've tuned them, scaled them, outgrown them, and moved data off them without customers noticing.
Ambitious Projects, Shipped: You've taken a fuzzy, high-stakes technical problem from first prototype to production across multiple teams. You can show the phased plan, the risks you called early, and the outcome.
Direction Others Adopted: You've written the design docs, RFCs, or standards that changed how an engineering organization builds, and they held up after you moved on.
LLMs in Real Products: You've built LLM-enriched workflows that delivered measurable value to SaaS customers, and you have grounded opinions on what AI does and doesn't change about building software.
A degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical industry experience.
Legally eligible to work in the U.S. on an ongoing basis.

Preferred

Databricks (Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, Spark) or comparable lakehouse experience such as Snowflake or Apache Iceberg. If you haven't used it but learn fast, we still want to hear from you.
Streaming platforms such as Kafka or Kinesis.
Building data access for AI agents, such as MCP servers or agent-facing APIs.
Real-time collaborative applications.
Current US Perks & Benefits:
Employer subsidized medical/vision and dental coverage for full-time employees
401k Match to help you save for your future (50% of your contribution up to the first 6% of your eligible pay)
Monthly stipend to support your work and productivity

Principal Software Engineer, Core Experiences (Remote Eligible)

Responsibilities

Qualification

Required

Preferred

Benefits

Company

Smartsheet

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