Principal Engineer

The Opportunity

The Kargo Platform organization builds what the rest of the business runs on: Workflow — the system of record holding the operational knowledge the company depends on, powering campaign creation, supply-side setup, and third-party integrations — alongside Self-Service Agentic Ad Buying and Creative Hub. As Principal Engineer you'll be the senior-most individual contributor across all three teams, setting multi-year technical direction, owning the architectural calls that are expensive to reverse, and deciding which things we shouldn't build at all. Your primary output is the capability of the engineers and systems around you.

The Daily To-Do

• Set and socialize the target architecture across Workflow, Self-Service Agentic Ad Buying, and Creative Hub, with a sequenced, incremental path from legacy systems to scalable distributed services
• Provide architectural direction, design review, and unblocking across multiple concurrent initiatives spanning all three teams — creating leverage without becoming the bottleneck
• Own the high-consequence, hard-to-reverse decisions on service boundaries, data ownership, orchestration technology, and build versus buy — and say no, early and clearly, to work that shouldn't happen
• Establish how Kargo builds LLM-backed and agentic features: evals, guardrails, cost and latency envelopes, and failure handling
• Up-level Senior and Staff engineers through design coaching, structured feedback, and pairing, and own the senior technical interview bar
• Identify the shared patterns, services, and infrastructure that should be common across the three domains rather than rebuilt in each
• Partner with engineering and product leadership to translate business strategy into technical strategy, and give an honest read on technical risk

Qualifications

• 12+ years in software engineering, including 3+ years at Staff, Principal, or demonstrably equivalent senior IC scope
• Deep, hands-on experience designing and operating distributed systems at scale — event streaming, async messaging (Kafka, Pub/Sub), and service coordination
• Strong data modelling instincts and experience evolving a system of record over years, plus building resilient integrations against third-party systems you don't control
• Hands-on experience building LLM-backed or agentic systems in production, with real opinions about evaluation, non-determinism, and reliability
• Expert-level proficiency in at least one high-performance, strongly typed language (TypeScript and/or Golang strongly preferred); deep command of CI/CD, containerization, cloud infrastructure, and production debugging at scale
• Demonstrated org-wide technical influence and a mentorship track record with specific examples of engineers who advanced under your guidance
• B.S. or higher in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or equivalent practical experience; AdTech or programmatic experience a strong plus, as is having owned a system-of-record or integration-heavy platform in any industry

In accordance with applicable federal, state, and local pay transparency laws, the anticipated base salary range for this position is listed below. In addition to base salary, this role is eligible for variable compensation — either the Kargo Sales Incentive Plan (sales roles) or an annual discretionary bonus (all other roles). Actual compensation may vary based on factors such as geographic location, work experience, education, and skills.

U.S Salary Range

$200,000—$230,000 USD