Principal Engineer, Streaming Systems

Hightouch is a modern AI platform for marketing and growth teams, leveraging AI agents to transform marketing workflows with speed and performance. Built on advancements in LLMs and cloud data warehouses, Hightouch partners with industry leaders. The team values impact, first-principles thinking, speed, compassion, and a growth mindset. This Principal Engineer role on the Streaming Systems team involves leading high-throughput systems for collecting, forwarding, and real-time computation of billions of behavioral events, crucial for scaling their rapidly growing streaming products and AI agent platform.

Must Have

• Lead work on high-throughput streaming systems
• Ensure sub-second end-to-end system latency at 1M+ messages/second
• Improve caching strategies for online computation services
• Architect systems for 1M+ messages/second deduplication
• Develop patterns for elegant and zero-downtime deployments
• Architect, build, deploy, and maintain distributed systems at scale
• Lead highly complex and ambitious technical projects
• Mentor and uplevel other engineers

Perks & Benefits

• Equity via ISO options
• Early exercise option
• 10-year post-termination exercise window

About Hightouch

Hightouch is the modern AI platform for marketing and growth teams. Our AI agents reimagine marketing workflows, allowing marketers to create content, plan campaigns, and execute strategies with transformational velocity and performance.

Hightouch is a rare company built on the intersection of two fundamental technological shifts: advances in LLMs and agentic AI, and the creation and rapid adoption of cloud data warehouses like Snowflake and Databricks. Building on these tailwinds, we’ve become a leader in AI marketing and partner with industry leaders like Domino’s, Chime, Spotify, Ramp, Whoop, Grammarly, and over 1000 others.

Our team focuses on making a meaningful impact for our customers. We approach challenges with first-principles thinking, move quickly and efficiently, and treat each other with compassion and kindness. We look for team members who are strong communicators, have a growth mindset, and are motivated and persistent in achieving our goals.

About the Role

We are looking for a principal engineer to join our Streaming Systems team, leading work on the high-throughput systems that collect, forward, and perform realtime computation on billions of behavioral events from our customer’s users. You'll be building the infrastructure that ingests clickstream, product interaction, and transactional data into our platform. This data is the platform for our “Cursor for Marketers” AI agent product.

Our streaming products’ revenue has 10x’d over the past year, and we need to ensure that we continue to scale. Our infrastructure needs to handle millions of messages per second at single second latency end to end. Recently, we added a computation engine that allows personalizing user experiences in real-time based on live behavior; we’re seeing 7-figure market response in the first few months and need to scale up to meet demand.

We are building new products from scratch, so we need someone who enjoys greenfield work and leading other engineers. Some of the problems you’d work on include:

1. Preserving <1s end to end system latency at throughput over 1,000,000 messages / second.

2. Improving caching strategies for our online computation service

3. Architecting a system that can deduplicate message delivery at 1,000,000 messages / second.

4. Patterns for elegant and zero-downtime deployments in our online computation service

We believe in enabling our engineers to do their best work for our customers by giving them extremely high levels of ownership and autonomy. You will own and deliver projects from start to finish, work directly with customers to solve their hardest scaling problems, and have significant influence over our technical roadmap.

The base salary range for this position is $180,000 - $320,000 USD per year, which is location independent in accordance with our remote-first policy. A large portion of the compensation will be in the form of equity via ISO options. We offer early exercise and a 10 year post-termination exercise window.

About You

• You are an experienced engineer with a passion for solving hard technical problems that generate real value for customers. You’re motivated by high ownership and are comfortable in a fast-paced, startup environment. You have experience leading highly complex and ambitious projects, and want to mentor and up level engineers around you.
• You have experience architecting, building, deploying, and maintaining distributed systems at scale, and can broadcast and encourage technical excellence in doing so.
• You have opinions about how engineering should be done, and want to help scale a rapidly growing engineering team.

Interview Process

Our goal with the interview process is to balance speed with giving both parties opportunities to assess whether there is a strong mutual fit. We will ask you questions, but we want you to ask us questions! Our technical interviews focus on how you design systems because we believe this is the best way for us to see how you work and for you to see how we collaborate. We don’t ask you to write code to solve technical brainteasers that don’t appear in your day to day job.

• Apply: Curl jobapi.hightouchdata.com on port 13784 and have followed those instructions before applying. It'll only take a minute!
• Recruiter Screen [30m]: Introductory call with our recruiting team to get to know each other and see if the role could be a good mutual fit.
• System Design Screen [45m]: Designing a data processing feature end-to-end.
• Hiring Manager Interview [30m]: Chat with hiring manager about past experiences and future operating preferences to assess fit on company values and operating principles.
• System Design Interview [90m]: Work with the interviewer to architect a system at a conceptual level. The problem will be at a pretty high level - and have both product and customer requirements as well as technical.
• Execution and Impact [60m]: Pick a project you lead and prepare to give the interviewer a walk through. Then deep dive and answer questions about the project execution and how you lead it.

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