Principal Engineer

Kargo, a leading mobile advertising platform, as a Principal Engineer. In this role, you will be the senior-most individual contributor across multiple teams, setting the technical direction and making critical architectural decisions. You will also be responsible for up-leveling senior and staff engineers, identifying shared patterns and services, and partnering with engineering and product leadership to translate business strategy into technical strategy. The ideal candidate will have a strong background in software engineering, experience with LLM-backed systems, and a track record of mentorship and technical influence.

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.

Responsibilities

• Provide architectural direction, design review, and unblocking across multiple concurrent initiatives spanning all three teams — creating leverage without becoming the bottleneck.
• Establish how Kargo builds LLM-backed and agentic features: evals, guardrails, cost and latency envelopes, and failure handling.

Requirements

• 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
• Hands-on experience building LLM-backed or agentic systems in production, with real opinions about evaluation, non-determinism, and reliability
• Demonstrated org-wide technical influence and a mentorship track record with specific examples of engineers who advanced under your guidance
• 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
• 12+ years in software engineering, including 3+ years at Staff, Principal, or demonstrably equivalent senior IC scope
• 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
• Deep, hands-on experience designing and operating distributed systems at scale — event streaming, async messaging (Kafka, Pub/Sub), and service coordination

Pay

USD 200,000 - 230,000