Principal Software Engineer

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.

To foster strong team alignment and productivity, Bangalore based team members are expected to work from the office 3 times per week.

As a Principal Software Engineer at Aerospike, you will serve as a technical authority for the company’s most critical systems and platform architecture. You will define and evolve the long-term technical direction of Aerospike’s high-performance, low-latency distributed database, balancing near-term delivery with multi-year scalability, reliability, and performance goals.

This role operates at the intersection of deep technical expertise and organizational influence. You will lead through vision, design excellence, and mentorship-setting architectural standards, resolving the most complex cross-cutting systems challenges, and aligning engineering execution with Aerospike’s product and business strategy. While you may engage with kernel, filesystem, or hardware-level concerns, your impact comes from shaping systems design across teams rather than owning a single component.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the long-term architecture of Aerospike’s core systems, particularly in networking, storage, low-level I/O, and hardware interaction.
• Serve as a technical authority and escalation point for the most complex and high-impact systems and performance issues.
• Lead cross-team technical initiatives that span multiple subsystems and engineering groups.
• Establish architectural principles, performance standards, and design best practices across the organization.
• Influence roadmap decisions by translating business and customer requirements into durable technical strategies.
• Guide and review designs for performance-critical systems, ensuring consistency, correctness, and scalability.
• Mentor Staff and Senior Staff engineers, developing technical leaders and raising the overall systems engineering bar.
• Represent systems architecture internally and, when appropriate, with customers, partners, or the open-source community.
• Benchmarking Leadership: This role specifically owns the end-to-end benchmarking strategy to prove Aerospike’s performance value (throughput, latency, and TCO advantages).
• AI-Driven Automation: Requires leveraging AI and Machine Learning models to automate complex test generation, perform automated root-cause analysis, analyze high-dimensional performance data, and predict system behavior under stress.
• Customer Success & Deal Execution: Positioned within the Customer Success team, working closely with Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success to provide the "technical truth" that wins enterprise deals.

Minimum Qualifications

• Expert-level proficiency in C/C++, with deep expertise in low-level programming, memory management, concurrency, and performance optimization.
• Required to have deep understanding of database internals like storage, queries, indexing etc
• Deep understanding of OS internals, including scheduling, memory management, and I/O subsystems, in Linux-based environments.
• 10 -17 years of experience building and operating complex systems software (e.g., distributed databases, networking stacks, kernels, storage systems).
• Proven track record of defining and evolving architecture for large-scale, performance-critical systems in production.
• Experience driving technical decisions across multiple teams without direct authority.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts to diverse audiences.
• Demonstrated technical judgment in balancing short-term tradeoffs with long-term platform health.

Preferred Qualifications

• Deep experience with large-scale distributed systems and their internals (e.g., Ceph, Lustre, or similar platforms).
• Strong command of distributed systems theory, including CAP theorem, consistency models, and consensus protocols (Raft, Paxos).
• Deep familiarity with database internals, ACID properties, indexing techniques, and storage engines.
• Expertise in performance engineering for high-throughput, low-latency systems at scale.
• Experience with Linux kernel development, filesystem architecture, or advanced OS and hardware tuning.
• Familiarity with PCIe, NVMe, DMA, RDMA, epoll, io_uring, and other low-level hardware or OS interfaces.
• History of influencing company-wide engineering standards, architecture, or technical direction.