Job Title: Distinguished Engineer (IC8) The Opportunity We have successfully built a market-leading SaaS product that is now essential to the daily operations of over 50,000 customers. We want to invest in our platform's future to prepare for the next decade of growth. We are seeking an elite-level Distinguished Engineer to own the technical vision, strategy, and execution of our platform's evolution. This is a rare opportunity to deconstruct a large-scale, successful product and rebuild it into a modern, scalable, and resilient microservices architecture. You will not just be writing code; you will be setting the technical foundation for the future of our business, ensuring we can innovate faster, scale globally, and continue to provide world-class service to our customers. The Role As a Distinguished Engineer, you will be the chief architect and technical authority for our application modernization initiative. You will operate with a high degree of autonomy, providing the thought leadership necessary to guide our engineering organization through a multi-year transformation. Your primary mission is to develop and implement a strategy that methodically transitions our monolithic application to a distributed system, all while ensuring the stability of our current platform and the continuous delivery of value to our customers. Key Responsibilities Strategic Planning: Develop and own the long-term technical roadmap Identify opportunities to invest in platform capabilities, innovation, and tooling Lead platform modernization, breaking the monolith, developer experience improvement, AI/ML capability integrations Build strategies to reduce tech debt, improve efficiency Architectural Leadership: Define architectural guidelines & best practices for the BU/Organization Promote modularity, reusability, observability, and resiliency Ensure adoption via workshops & architectural reviews Serve as a decision maker and escalation point for architecture disputes Guiding strategies for multi-region deployments, distributed data, and async communication Embed SRE, security, compliance, data privacy, and performance thinking into architecture from the ground up Encourage adoption of latest technologiesHands-On Implementation & Prototyping: You are expected to be deeply technical. Lead by example by prototyping new services, creating boilerplate for teams to follow, and tackling the most complex technical challenges yourself Technical Governance: As a Distinguished Engineer, you are expected to establish and uphold the technical standards, practices, and decision-making frameworks Define coding standards, architectural patterns and technology principles Guide architecture review process ensuring alignment with company-wide standards Define policies for adoption, maturity, and deprecation of frameworks, tools and languages Ensure key decisions are made with transparency, peer input, and traceability Guidance on critical tradeoffs - build vs buy, open source Mentorship & Influence: Act as a technical mentor to senior ICs & technical leaders. Elevate the technical capabilities of the entire BU/organization through presentations, documentation, and one-on-one guidance. Your decisions and insights should influence and align engineers and leaders across the company. Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with product, business, and executive teams to translate product vision into scalable architectural solutions Identify platform level investment for product velocity Engage with Design, UX and research to ensure customer experience, accessibility, performance, and responsiveness Represent engineering in strategic customer conversations or escalations by partnering with the business stakeholders Drive collaboration across engineering functions Participate in investment prioritization and OKR reviewsRisk Management: Should play a critical role in identifying and mitigating technical risks that could jeopardize product’s success, customer experience and integrity. Qualifications & Experience 18+ yearsof software engineering experience, with at least6 yearsin a Principal/Staff/Distinguished level roles, where you have been responsible for the technical direction of a large-scale, business-critical system. Proven, hands-on experienceleading the successful modernization of a significant monolithic application into a microservices or service-oriented architecture. You must be able to speak in detail about the strategies you used, the challenges you faced, and the outcomes you delivered. Expert-level proficiency in one or more OO programming languages such asJava, Ruby on Rails, etc. Deep expertise in designing and building distributed systems, including an understanding of the trade-offs between different architectural patterns (e.g., REST, gRPC, event-driven). Extensive experience withcloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) ,containerization (Docker, Kubernetes) , and associated infrastructure. Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, or equivalent, and demonstrable real-world experience. Key Skills Architectural & Strategic Skills Domain-Driven Design (DDD) Strangler Fig & other migration patterns Event-Driven Architecture Data decomposition strategies System performance modeling & scaling Technology evaluation & selection Roadmap development Technical & Engineering Skills Microservices & API Design (REST, gRPC) Message Brokers (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS) Container Orchestration (Kubernetes) Databases (SQL & NoSQL, understanding trade-offs) CI/CD pipelines and GitOps Observability (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry) Secure coding practices in a distributed environment Leadership & Soft Skills Exceptional communication (written and verbal) Ability to influence without authority Stakeholder management Mentoring and coaching senior engineers Pragmatism and business-awareness Comfort with ambiguity Screening Questions These questions are designed to be asked in phases to assess the candidate's depth and breadth of experience. Phase 1: Initial Experience & High-Level Approach The Elevator Pitch:"Describe the largest and most complex application modernization project you have led. What was the business driver, what was the technical state before and after, and what was your specific role in it?" Strategic Scoping:"Imagine you've just joined. Your first task is to create a 6-month plan. What are the first three things you would do in your first 30 days to understand our monolith and build a strategy?" Core Philosophy:"When is it a bad idea to break a piece of a monolith into a microservice? How do you decide what to break out first?" Phase 2: Technical & Architectural Deep Dive Decomposition Strategy:"How would you identify service boundaries within our 14-year-old monolith? What tools or techniques, like Domain-Driven Design, would you use, and how would you handle areas with unclear ownership or high coupling?" Data Management:"Migrating to microservices often creates significant data challenges. How would you handle a scenario where a new service needs data that is currently locked in the monolith's database? Describe the patterns (e.g., Change Data Capture, data APIs, etc.) you would consider and their trade-offs." Ensuring Consistency:"Let's talk about distributed transactions. Can you explain the Saga pattern and a situation where you have implemented or would recommend it? What are its biggest drawbacks?" Ripple Effects & Testing:"You mentioned the challenge of not knowing the 'ripple effect' of changes. How do you mitigate this in a microservices environment? What does a robust testing strategy (e.g., contract testing, integration testing) look like?" Technology Choices:"When would you choose gRPC over REST for service communication? When would you prefer a message queue like Kafka over a direct API call?" Phase 3: Strategic & Leadership Acumen Balancing Priorities:"We need to continue delivering new features while paying down this technical debt. How would you work with product teams to balance these competing priorities? Describe a time you had to negotiate this." Measuring Success:"How would you measure the success of this multi-year initiative? What are the key metrics—both technical and business-related—that you would track to show we are on the right path?" Team Enablement:"This transformation is a huge change for our developers. How would you bring the engineering team along on this journey? What tools, processes, and training (i.e., the 'paved road') would you introduce to make them successful?" A Past Mistake:"Tell me about a significant architectural decision you made that turned out to be wrong. Why was it wrong, and what did you do to correct it?"
Job Title
Distinguished Engineer