{"id":1258458,"url":"https://alion.io/job/aerospike-principal-software-engineer","title":"Principal Software Engineer","company":{"id":1792229,"name":"Aerospike","domain":"aerospike.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/aerospike","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Rippling","truth_index":null},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Bengaluru, India"],"countries":["IN"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":36000,"max_usd":77000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":8},"experience_years_min":10,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Aerospike","optional":false},{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"Linux","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-03T11:35:58Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-03","last_verified_at":"2026-09-27T22:44:15Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":24,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":24},"description":"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.\nGlobal 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.\nAt 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.\nTo foster strong team alignment and productivity, Bangalore based team members are expected to work from the office 3 times per week.\nAs 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.\nThis 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.\nResponsibilities\nDefine and drive the long-term architecture of Aerospike’s core systems, particularly in networking, storage, low-level I/O, and hardware interaction.\nServe as a technical authority and escalation point for the most complex and high-impact systems and performance issues.\nLead cross-team technical initiatives that span multiple subsystems and engineering groups.\nEstablish architectural principles, performance standards, and design best practices across the organization.\nInfluence roadmap decisions by translating business and customer requirements into durable technical strategies.\nGuide and review designs for performance-critical systems, ensuring consistency, correctness, and scalability.\nMentor Staff and Senior Staff engineers, developing technical leaders and raising the overall systems engineering bar.\nRepresent systems architecture internally and, when appropriate, with customers, partners, or the open-source community.\nBenchmarking Leadership: This role specifically owns the end-to-end benchmarking strategy to prove Aerospike’s performance value (throughput, latency, and TCO advantages).\nAI-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.\nCustomer 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.\nMinimum Qualifications\nExpert-level proficiency in C/C++, with deep expertise in low-level programming, memory management, concurrency, and performance optimization.\nRequired to have deep understanding of database internals like storage, queries, indexing etc \nDeep understanding of OS internals, including scheduling, memory management, and I/O subsystems, in Linux-based environments.\n10 -17 years of experience building and operating complex systems software (e.g., distributed databases, networking stacks, kernels, storage systems).\nProven track record of defining and evolving architecture for large-scale, performance-critical systems in production.\nExperience driving technical decisions across multiple teams without direct authority.\nStrong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts to diverse audiences.\nDemonstrated technical judgment in balancing short-term tradeoffs with long-term platform health.\nPreferred Qualifications\nDeep experience with large-scale distributed systems and their internals (e.g., Ceph, Lustre, or similar platforms).\nStrong command of distributed systems theory, including CAP theorem, consistency models, and consensus protocols (Raft, Paxos).\nDeep familiarity with database internals, ACID properties, indexing techniques, and storage engines.\nExpertise in performance engineering for high-throughput, low-latency systems at scale.\nExperience with Linux kernel development, filesystem architecture, or advanced OS and hardware tuning.\nFamiliarity with PCIe, NVMe, DMA, RDMA, epoll, io_uring, and other low-level hardware or OS interfaces.\nHistory of influencing company-wide engineering standards, architecture, or technical direction.","description_format":"text","description_chars":5090,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":10,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":[],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-25T19:45:03Z"}],"liveness":{"score":52,"band":"ok","label":"Likely open","p_open":1,"p_active":0.687,"p_room":0.75,"age_days":23,"expected_fill_days":24,"reasons":["conf:2","velocity","win:late"],"computed_at":"2026-09-27T05:45:00Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/aerospike-principal-software-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/aerospike-principal-software-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-09-28T00:59:26Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","usage":{"tier":"crawler","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":574,"day_limit":5000,"remaining_today":4426,"minute_limit":60,"resets_at":"2026-09-29T00:00:00Z"}}}