Principal Engineer

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and operate always-on, secure distributed systems with rigorous availability, throughput, and error SLOs that process more than a petabyte a month of unstructured data. Own how the systems behave under failure and load. Influence execution across engineering.
• Resolve the most complex, cross-organizational technical problems through deep technical expertise, collaboration, and hands-on implementation.
• Define and lead the organization-wide technical vision and architecture and shape long-term platform and data strategy.
• Establish enterprise standards for system scalability, reliability, maintainability, security, testability, and flexibility, partnering with teams to drive adoption.
• Influence and align engineering execution with company-level strategy and shape engineering culture across the organization.
• Influence executive-level product and platform decisions.
• Lead the evolution of Enrichment from primarily batch-oriented jobs toward streaming-first, continuously processing pipelines that deliver real-time and large-scale results (1K to 1B+ files), and write the code that proves the patterns out.
• Stay deeply hands-on. Principals at Relativity aren't ivory-tower architects. They design, implement, review, and operate production software. You'll be in the codebase, in the metrics, and owning systems end to end.
• Drive our agentic engineering push within Enrichment. Establish best practices, guardrails, and tooling for AI-assisted and agentic development, and raise the bar for how the domain designs, tests, and ships software in an AI-driven world.

What We're Looking For

Required

• 12+ years of experience designing, building and operating complex cloud-native distributed systems.
• Experience building and operating systems held to strict availability, latency, and throughput SLOs, including 99.99% uptime and error budgets, where customers feel it immediately when something is down or wrong.
• Deep expertise in high-throughput data processing and transformation at scale, distributing work horizontally across a cluster: large batch pipelines, streaming/continuous systems, or both.
• Experience with durable workflow/orchestration engines (e.g., Temporal), event-driven architectures, and container-based compute (e.g., Kubernetes).
• Strong grounding in reliability, performance, security, and observability for services.
• Recognized authority in architecture and distributed systems.
• Experience defining organization-wide technical standards.
• Deep involvement in security, compliance, and reliability strategy.
• Ability to align technical vision with company-level strategy.
• Proven influence at senior and executive levels.
• Exceptional mentorship, communication, and strategic thinking skills.

Preferred

• Hands-on experience designing or scaling streaming / continuous data-processing systems (e.g., Event Hub, Kafka, Apache Spark, or similar stream-processing frameworks).
• Hands-on experience processing large volumes of raw, unstructured or semi-structured content such as documents, email, files, and media, not solely structured or transactional records.
• Experience with modern lakehouse and columnar processing at scale (e.g., Spark, Delta Lake, Iceberg, Parquet, Arrow).
• Background in legal tech, eDiscovery, search and information retrieval, security or observability platforms, or other high-scale regulated domains.
• Demonstrated leadership in adopting agentic and AI-assisted engineering workflows (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or Claude Code) and establishing team best practices and guardrails.
• Experience guiding enterprise system or data architecture.

Why We Could Be A Great Fit

• Impactful Mission: Organize Data, Discover the Truth and Act on It - Our customers include Fortune 500 enterprises and leading law firms managing high-stakes matters on our platform.
• Scale That Matters: You'll work on systems processing more than a petabyte of unstructured data per month, where the engineering problems are genuinely hard and the impact is immediate.
• Growth Path: Engineers gain exposure across the stack, from distributed systems to AI-enabled workflows, accelerating career growth.
• Engineering Culture: Continuous delivery, strong observability, and end-to-end ownership.
• Inclusive Environment: Diverse backgrounds and perspectives make us stronger.
• Community Impact: Volunteer opportunities and company-sponsored charitable programs.
• Compensation & Benefits: Competitive salary, health and retirement programs, wellness resources, discretionary time off (DTO), parental leave for primary and secondary caregivers, two annual company breaks, home office stipend, and an equity program.