We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to join our R&D organization and take technical ownership of foundational capabilities at the heart of platform.
This is a senior, deeply hands-on technical leadership role, combining architectural responsibility with substantial involvement in design, implementation, and production problem-solving. You will shape and build critical systems spanning distributed systems, networking, infrastructure, high availability, reliability, and performance.
You will play a central role in the evolution, reliability, and scalability of technology as our product and customer base continue to grow.
provides secure access solutions for organizations operating complex and mission-critical environments. Our technology enables customers to securely connect people to the applications and operational systems they need-without compromising security, resilience, or productivity.
Responsibilities:
Core platform architecture: Own the architecture and evolution of foundational capabilities across platform, translating complex technical requirements into pragmatic, maintainable solutions
Hands-on software development: Design, implement, test, and operate high-quality production software, remaining closely involved in the code and leading through technical execution
Distributed systems and networking: Develop and evolve capabilities related to clustering, distributed consensus, service communication, high availability, and our network stack
Technical ownership: Take end-to-end responsibility for critical components-from architectural decisions and implementation through observability, deployment, production operation, and continuous improvement
Reliability and performance: Solve challenging problems involving concurrency, scale, resilience, failure recovery, resource utilization, and system performance
Engineering excellence: Help establish and promote strong engineering practices in areas such as design, code quality, testing, maintainability, observability, and operational readiness
Technical leadership and mentoring: Review designs and code, mentor engineers, and serve as a trusted technical partner to engineering leadership and development teams
Cross-functional collaboration: Work closely with Product, DevOps, Security, QA, and other engineering teams to deliver cohesive solutions to complex customer and product requirements
Long-term technical direction: Identify architectural risks, technical debt, and opportunities for improvement, and lead initiatives that strengthen the platform over time

We are looking for a Senior Software Architect to lead the architecture and technical execution of AI products and shared AI capabilities.

This is a strategic and hands-on role for an architect who combines strong backend and distributed-systems expertise with practical experience in data platforms, cloud architecture, web technologies, and AI systems.

You will own the technical architecture from early concepts and proofs of concept through production delivery and operation. You will work closely with engineers, product managers, security researchers, and architects to turn emerging AI capabilities into secure, scalable, reliable, and maintainable products across SaaS and on-premises deployments.

The successful candidate will provide hands-on technical leadership, help engineers resolve complex design and implementation decisions, and ensure that the architecture supports product quality, operational simplicity, and long-term evolution.

What You Will Own

Define and drive the architecture of AI-powered products and shared AI capabilities across SaaS and on-premises deployments.
Design scalable backend services, APIs, data pipelines, data models, and storage solutions for AI and security workloads.
Lead architectural decisions across data ingestion, processing, retrieval, model integration, AI orchestration, and product integration.
Work closely with engineers throughout design and implementation, helping resolve complex technical decisions, trade-offs, and delivery challenges.
Provide hands-on technical leadership from early concepts and proofs of concept through production delivery and operation.
Design systems with clear controls for scalability, backpressure, bounded resource usage, resilience, data integrity, recovery, and observability.
Ensure solutions meet enterprise requirements for security, isolation, permissions, auditability, sensitive-data handling, and on-premises operation.
Define patterns for integrating AI models, retrieval systems, tools, workflows, and deterministic product capabilities.
Design AI-enabled workflows with quality, latency, cost, failure handling, model limitations, and operational complexity in mind.
Support the architecture and development of web-based AI experiences and their integration with backend services and Aqua product workflows.
Evaluate technologies and conduct proofs of concept to validate feasibility, performance, scalability, security, and operational fit.
Define and document architecture standards, technical guidelines, and reusable patterns for the AI team.
Review system designs and critical implementations, and mentor engineers on architecture, backend development, data systems, and production readiness.
Collaborate with Product and Engineering to balance customer value, delivery speed, technical risk, and long-term maintainability.
Partner with other architecture and platform teams to reuse existing capabilities and maintain alignment across Aqua products.