Principal Engineer (L5)

See yourself at Twilio

Join the team as our next Principal engineer (L5) on Twilio’s Segment, Data Pipelines team.

About the job

As a Principal Engineer on the Twilio Segment Data platform/pipelines team, you won’t just design systems—you will be the design anchor for data platforms that processes hundreds of thousands of data points per second. We are looking for a visionary, deeply inquisitive engineer who has built 0-1 architectures, scaled them to global proportions, and collected the battle scars that come from pushing cloud-native systems to their absolute limits. You will guide our engineering organization through complex distributed design choices, ensuring reliability, performance, and cost-efficiency while querying petabytes of data for the world's leading Customer Data Platform (CDP). If you are naturally curious, obsessed with knowing exactly how systems break under intense load, and eager to pioneer the integration of AI into real-world data processing, this is your ultimate playground.

Responsibilities

In this role, you’ll:

• Own the technical north star and deliver robust, highly composable routing experiences for the core Data platform and pipelines at Twilio Segment.
• Design and pioneer always-available, fault-tolerant distributed systems in cloud environments, using past system failures to design out-of-the-box resilience.
• Lead through technical influence, masterfully guiding high-stakes design decisions and articulating the precise trade-offs between cost, performance, and reliability to both engineers and executives.
• Translate complex technical strategies into clear, elegant, and actionable blueprints that align diverse stakeholders, including Product Managers, Architects, and engineering teams.
• Actively prototype and experiment, bringing an inquisitive mindset to the platform by identifying where emerging AI technologies and LLMs can solve systemic data processing challenges.

Qualifications

Twilio values diverse experiences from all kinds of industries, and we encourage everyone who meets the required qualifications to apply. If your career is just starting or hasn't followed a traditional path, don't let that stop you from considering Twilio. We are always looking for people who will bring something new to the table!

*Required:

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 12+ years of programming experience. Deep battle-tested experience with high-scale messaging/streaming systems and distributed processing engines (handling several thousand events/sec minimum).
• Mastery of high-level service design, with a proven ability to model complex interfaces and internals in a properly modular, composable, and extensible way.
• Expert programming experience in Go or similar concurrent, object-oriented languages, with a sharp eye for performance bottlenecks.
• An active "AI story"—demonstrated, hands-on experience identifying, prototyping, and deploying GenAI/LLM solutions to solve real-world engineering or data processing challenges.
• Profound technical depth in distributed systems, high-scale ingestion, and cutting-edge cloud-native architecture.
• Superb communication and problem-solving skills, with a natural inclination to mentor others and a relentless drive for operational excellence

Desired:

• Advanced proficiency with high-throughput datastores, distributed caching layers, and container orchestrators (Docker/Kubernetes).
• Experience with modern CI/CD pipelines and robust observability frameworks (Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus) to predict and diagnose failures.
• Deep familiarity with broader AI/ML infrastructure and data workflows.
• Hands-on experience managing, optimizing, and operating large-scale AWS cloud infrastructure.
• A proven track record of driving technical alignment and collaboration across a geographically distributed engineering team.

Location

This role will be based in any of the permitted 5 India states (Delhi, Karnataka,…