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Principal Software Engineer - Capella Control Plane

Location: San Jose, California (Hybrid - in office at least 3 days/week)

Couchbase Capella is a fully managed Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) platform that powers mission-critical applications with a modern, distributed NoSQL database. The Control Plane team builds and operates the foundational systems that deliver reliability, scalability, and seamless experiences across cloud environments.

We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer to serve as the cross-team technical authority for Capella's Control Plane - the platform that orchestrates SaaS interactions with major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure). This role is central to the evolution of Capella's multi-cloud control plane and will shape the systems that provision, secure, and operate the platform at scale. You will set a durable technical direction with organization level influence, be accountable for production outcomes, and drive solutions to ambiguous, high-stakes problems through hands-on development and deep distributed systems expertise.

Key Responsibilities

• Architecture & Technical Direction: Define and evolve the control plane architecture for scalability, reliability, performance, and security.
• Hands-on Development: Develop and deliver production-quality Golang code for critical Capella platform services. Establish and enforce coding standards, CI/CD practices, and design patterns.
• Multi-Cloud Infrastructure: Architect and optimize multi-cloud deployments, networking models, VPC/VNet peering, load balancing, and secure connectivity across AWS, GCP, and Azure. Build and scale multi-tenant control plane services that orchestrate cluster lifecycle across providers.
• Reliability & Observability: Define and implement monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting standards for operational excellence. Own accountability for production outcomes including root cause analysis and long-term remediation of critical issues.
• Platform Capabilities: Lead design and delivery of core platform capabilities such as provisioning, lifecycle management, and security controls. Tackle ambiguous distributed systems challenges involving scaling, networking, and performance.
• Cross-Team Leadership: Exercise cross-team technical authority, partnering with product, SRE, Quality Engineering, operations, and global engineering teams across geographies to align technical direction with business goals. Maintain working knowledge of web UI architecture and partner effectively with frontend engineers on end-to-end control plane workflows.
• Mentorship & Culture: Guide engineers across levels, perform code reviews, and set a high bar for engineering culture.
• Innovation: Research and evaluate cloud-native technologies, frameworks, and architectures for Capella's evolution.

Must-Have Skills & Experience

• Expertise in Golang with proven experience building distributed, cloud-native systems.
• Strong knowledge of system design, high availability, fault tolerance, and performance tuning.
• Hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Azure), including networking (VPCs, routing, load balancing, firewalls, private connectivity) and Kubernetes/container orchestration.
• Experience designing and building control plane and platform components for SaaS platforms at scale.
• Proven experience leading cross-team architecture and platform decisions in complex, ambiguous cloud and distributed systems environments.
• Working knowledge of web UI architecture and ability to partner effectively with frontend engineers on end-to-end control plane workflows.
• Experience mentoring engineers and driving org-level influence on engineering culture and standards.

Nice-to-Have Skills & Experience

• Experience with DBaaS platforms or large-scale database infrastructure.
• Exposure to AI/ML integrations within SaaS platforms (e.g., model serving, vector databases, AI-assisted workflows).

Education & Experience

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 12+ years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 5+ years in cloud/distributed systems.
• Prior principal or staff engineer-level experience leading architecture and platform initiatives in cloud infrastructure or large-scale SaaS environments.