Senior Principal Engineer, Telemetry & Licensing Systems

Aerospike is the real-time database for mission-critical use cases and workloads, including machine learning, generative, and agentic AI. Aerospike powers millions of transactions per second with millisecond latency, at a fraction of the total cost of ownership compared to other databases. Global leaders, including Adobe, Airtel, Barclays, Criteo, DBS Bank, Experian, Grab, HDFC Bank, PayPal, Sony Interactive Entertainment, The Trade Desk, and Wayfair, rely on Aerospike for customer 360, fraud detection, real-time bidding, profile stores, recommendation engines, and other use cases.

At Aerospike, we dream big and deliver even bigger. Our mission is to unleash the power of the world’s real-time data with a database built for infinite scale, speed, and sustainability.

If you're ready to shape the future of data, join us.

About the Role

Aerospike is building the core systems that fuel our growth engine, telemetry ingestion, licensing enforcement, entitlement APIs, and usage-based monetization. As Senior Principal Engineer, you’ll set the architectural vision for these platforms, breaking down highly ambiguous challenges into clear, actionable designs. You’ll bring a track record of solving high-risk, high-impact problems and will shape how Aerospike enables product-led growth across self-managed and cloud deployments.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and architecture of Aerospike’s telemetry and licensing systems, ensuring global scale, reliability, and security.
• Break down complex, ambiguous technical challenges into actionable strategies that align system design with company growth goals.
• Define long-term architecture for entitlement services, usage metering, high-watermark billing, and event models.
• Partner with Product, RevOps, and Finance to integrate telemetry and licensing into monetization and adoption workflows.
• Mentor and guide engineers across teams, building alignment on system design and execution.
• Anticipate technical risks in hybrid SaaS + self-managed deployments and define mitigation strategies.
• Drive adoption of observability-first practices across telemetry pipelines and licensing services.
• Participate in a 24x7 on-call rotation, providing senior-level technical leadership during critical incidents.
• Represent Aerospike externally as a thought leader in telemetry, licensing, and distributed systems.

Qualifications

• 15+ years of experience in software engineering, with expertise in high-scale, high-performance service-oriented systems.
• Proven success designing and delivering large-scale telemetry, ingestion, or licensing platforms in production.
• Strong experience across cloud environments (AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, containers, microservices).
• Hands-on depth in languages such as Java, Python, Go, or similar, with comfort across multiple stacks.
• Track record of modernizing complex systems and driving initiatives spanning dozens of engineers and global teams.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, able to clarify complexity and influence at all levels.
• Preferred: Experience with observability and incident response tools (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, PagerDuty).
• Preferred: Industry recognition through open-source contributions, publications, or external talks.

Aerospike is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to providing an environment free from discrimination on the basis of race, religion, color, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, non-disqualifying physical or mental disability, national origin, veteran status, or any other basis covered by appropriate law. Join us at Aerospike and be part of a dynamic team that is shaping the future of data management. Salary Range for California Based Applicants: [$240,000 - $312,000] (actual compensation will be determined based on experience, location, and other factors permitted by law)