Principal Engineer - Open Source Data Platform (ODP)

About the role

We are seeking a Principal Engineer with at least 14 years of experience to serve as a technical visionary and thought leader for Acceldata's Open Data Platform (ODP). In this role, you will define the long-term technical strategy, lead the most complex architectural initiatives, and represent Acceldata in the global open-source and distributed systems community. You will work directly with engineering leadership and executives to shape product direction while driving innovation across the organization. WHY JOIN US? As a Principal Engineer at Acceldata, you will be at the forefront of shaping the future of enterprise data platforms, defining the technical vision for systems that power mission-critical workloads across the world's largest organizations. Your decisions will directly influence not only our platform but also the broader data ecosystem through open-source contributions and industry leadership. You'll work alongside Apache members, committers, and industry veterans who are passionate about solving the hardest problems in distributed computing. This is a rare opportunity to combine deep technical impact with strategic influence, building technology that matters while shaping the direction of a growing data observability company.

Requirements

• 15+ years of hands-on software development experience with at least 8 years focused on distributed systems, big data platforms, or data infrastructure.
• Proven track record of leading large-scale technical initiatives from conception to production across multiple teams.
• Expert-level proficiency in Java or Scala; strong skills in Python and systems languages.
• Deep expertise in distributed computing, including consensus protocols, distributed transactions, data replication, partitioning strategies, and optimization with modern table formats.
• Extensive experience in architecting and scaling systems using Hadoop, Spark, Hive, Trino, Kafka, Flink, and related technologies at production scale (100s to 1000s of nodes).
• Demonstrated ability to design and evolve complex systems that handle petabyte-scale data with high availability and performance requirements.
• Expert knowledge of cloud-native architectures, Kubernetes orchestration, and multi-cloud deployment patterns.
• Track record of diagnosing and resolving complex distributed system issues, including performance optimization, resource management, and failure mode analysis.
• Significant contributions to major open-source projects; experience working with distributed global teams and open-source governance models.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills; proven ability to influence technical direction across organizations and with external stakeholders.
• Ability to balance long-term technical vision with near-term delivery requirements; experience making build vs. buy decisions.

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