Principal Engineer

About the role

At Twilio, we're shaping the future of communications, all from the comfort of our homes. We deliver innovative solutions to hundreds of thousands of businesses and empower millions of developers worldwide to craft personalized customer experiences. Our dedication to remote-first work , and strong culture of connection and global inclusion means that no matter your location, you're part of a vibrant team with diverse experiences making a global impact each day. As we continue to revolutionize how the world interacts, we're acquiring new skills and experiences that make work feel truly rewarding. Your career at Twilio is in your hands. We use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help make our hiring process efficient. That said, every hiring decision is made by real Twilions! . See yourself at Twilio Join the team as Twilio's next Principal Engineer. The Compliance Experiences team sits at the heart of the Twilio platform, owning two critical domains: Phone Numbers and Compliance (KYC). In 2026, "getting a phone number" is no longer a simple API call; it requires sophisticated orchestration across global phone number inventory, real-time identity verification, regulatory compliance, and operational tooling at massive scale. Twilio's KYC Platform, the gateway to accessing all of Twilio's communication APIs, enables customers to securely provision and operate communication services globally while navigating complex, constantly evolving regulatory requirements. As a Principal Engineer (P5), you will own the technical strategy for a platform that processes millions of requests. You will be expected to pioneer AI-driven development workflows using LLMs and agentic agents to accelerate code generation, automate architectural reviews, and synthesize complex global telecommunications regulations into executable logic. Your mission is to collapse the distance between a great idea and a production ready feature.

Responsibilities

• In this role, you'll:
• DRAW THE OWL: Lead the architecture and long-term technical roadmap, transitioning legacy systems into a modern, distributed microservices architecture that supports global scale.
• BE AN OWNER: Drive technical excellence across multiple teams, making critical architectural decisions that balance rapid feature innovation with world-class reliability and security.
• WEAR THE CUSTOMER'S SHOES: Partner with Product Managers to translate complex global telecommunications regulations and customer needs into elegant, developer-first APIs and application workflows.
• EMPOWER OTHERS: Mentor and uplift senior and staff engineers. Foster a culture of technical curiosity, ownership, and continuous learning. Teach the team how to move from "writing code" to "reviewing and orchestrating AI-generated logic" without sacrificing security or quality.
• RUTHLESSLY PRIORITIZE: Identify and mitigate technical risks early, ranging from scalability bottlenecks to security vulnerabilities and lead the team through complex production incidents with a focus on long-term remediation.
• WRITE IT DOWN: Communicate complex technical strategies to both executive leadership and engineering teams through high-quality design documents, RFCs, and presentations.

Requirements

• *Required:
• 16+ years of experience designing and developing highly available, high scale, secure, mission-critical cloud native enterprise distributed systems.
• Expert Proficiency in Java or Go , with deep knowledge of AWS ecosystems (Lambda, EKS, DynamoDB, Kafka).
• Architectural Mastery: Deep experience with cloud-native infrastructure ( AWS preferred), microservices patterns, and designing "five-nines" (99.999%) resilient systems.
• AI-Native Workflow: Demonstrated experience using AI tools to significantly accelerate software delivery. You should be comfortable discussing how you use LLMs for architectural brainstorming, debugging, and code synthesis.
• API Excellence: A track record of building and maintaining high-volume public-facing APIs that focus on exceptional developer experience.
• Data Savvy: Experience with high-throughput data processing and storage solutions (SQL/NoSQL, Redis, Kafka, or Spark).
• Infrastructure as Code: Proficiency with Kubernetes, Terraform, and modern CI/CD paradigms.
• Leadership: Proven ability to influence technical strategy

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