Principal Engineer

We are seeking a Principal or Staff Engineer to provide deep architectural and technical leadership across our product platform. You will report directly to the CTO and work across engineering, product, and leadership teams to guide architectural strategy and execution.

This is a hands-on, high-impact IC role for someone who enjoys connecting the dots across systems, products, and people. You will shape the long-term architecture of our SaaS and on-prem offerings, guide foundational design decisions, and ensure technical coherence as we scale. The role balances high-level system design with grounded collaboration, empowering engineers to build resilient, composable systems with clean boundaries.

What you'll do

• Drive holistic software architecture across teams and domains, aligning technical direction with product goals and user value

• Design and evaluate systems architecture for scalability, flexibility, and maintainability

• Guide how teams structure technical domains, boundaries, contracts, and composition

• Lead architectural SIGs and design reviews to foster cross-functional alignment and learning

• Help lead foundational modeling choices, from normalized relational schemas to flexible document stores and protobuf-based APIs

• Collaborate across teams on system decomposition, interface design, and evolution of distributed services

• Write clear, actionable proposals and architecture documents with diagrams and tradeoff analysis

• Mentor and support engineers across teams to drive good architectural outcomes within their domains

What you'll bring

• 10+ years of experience designing and building production-grade systems

• Proven success leading architectural direction across multiple teams

• Strong understanding of software architecture principles, including domain boundaries, modular design, and decoupled interfaces

• Familiarity with distributed systems and microservice architecture patterns

• Experience designing data models and APIs, including REST and gRPC, with awareness of schema evolution and compatibility

• Strong CS fundamentals—data structures, algorithms, consistency models, etc.

• Expertise with modern backend technologies and data systems (e.g., PostgreSQL, Redis, ClickHouse)

• Proficiency in Python and Go

• A pragmatic, enablement-first mindset: drive alignment, not control

• Strong written and verbal communication skills with ability to articulate complex technical ideas to diverse audiences

Our culture and values: 

• We own and solve problems with high attention to detail.

• Our open source contributors, users, customers & team are all part of our community. When our community wins, we win.

• We prioritize simplicity and think twice before adding complexity

• Clear communication helps keep our team aligned and collaborating smoothly.

About NetBox Labs:

NetBox Labs helps companies build and manage complex networks. We help customers accelerate network automation by delivering open, composable products and supporting the network automation community.

NetBox Labs is the commercial steward of open source NetBox, the world’s most popular network source of truth, and Orb, the next-generation open source network observability platform. Our products include NetBox Enterprise, a fully supported self-managed NetBox with advanced features, and NetBox Cloud, a secure, scalable, and reliable SaaS edition of NetBox.

NetBox powers thousands of companies, and NetBox Labs is backed by investment from Notable Capital (formerly GGV), Grafana Labs CEO Raj Dutt, Flybridge, IBM, Salesforce Ventures, and Mango Capital.