SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Weave is seeking a Principal Engineer to serve as the technical cornerstone of the Messaging Fellowship—the domain responsible for how 30,000+ healthcare practices communicate with patients across SMS, MMS, email, fax, and emerging channels. This is a company-level technical leadership role focused on shaping strategy and architectural decisions rather than individual contributor output.
You will own the multi-year technical vision for messaging infrastructure that processes hundreds of millions of messages and manages terabytes of data. You'll partner with Engineering Directors, Staff Engineers, and Product leadership to ensure technical decisions position Weave for long-term competitive advantage. Success is measured by how the organization's technical capability grows through your influence, mentorship, and strategic leadership.
The Messaging Fellowship encompasses multiple engineering teams responsible for core communication capabilities—appointment reminders, review requests, missed-call texts, two-way messaging, and the infrastructure delivering billions of messages reliably at scale. You will work across these teams as a technical leader, partnering with Engineering Managers, Staff Engineers, and cross-functional stakeholders to drive architectural coherence and strategic technical initiatives.
Key responsibilities include: owning multi-year technical vision for messaging infrastructure and ensuring architectural decisions position Weave for scale, reliability, and competitive advantage; driving architectural coherence across multiple teams and resolving cross-system dependencies and technical debt at the platform level; leading technical due diligence for major initiatives including build-vs-buy decisions, vendor evaluations, and platform migrations; identifying and solving company-level technical problems spanning organizational boundaries; compiling information across systems, teams, and projects to develop comprehensive solutions with extensive validation, rollback, and testing plans; forecasting project costs in time, money, and opportunity cost; monitoring the industry landscape and ensuring Weave stays ahead of the curve in messaging and data infrastructure; cutting through noise to identify genuine strategic value and lead key initiatives; shaping company-wide standards for engineering excellence, observability, and reliability in distributed systems; actively mentoring Staff and Senior Engineers across the fellowship; elevating architectural thinking through design reviews and documentation standards; and building organizational capability that persists beyond individual contributions.
Reports to Director of Engineering.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 12+ years of software engineering experience with progressive technical leadership scope
- Track record of leading cross-team technical initiatives that delivered measurable business outcomes
- Demonstrated ability to influence without authority, build consensus across organizational boundaries, and translate technical tradeoffs into business terms
- Deep expertise in distributed systems architecture, including building and operating services that handle hundreds of millions of transactions and terabytes of data
- Proven experience with event streaming and messaging infrastructure (Kafka, Google Pub/Sub, or similar) at significant scale
- Strong background in scalable data stores—both relational (PostgreSQL at scale, Vitess, Spanner) and NoSQL (Bigtable, Redis, etc.)
- Operational experience with cloud-native infrastructure on GCP or AWS, including Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code, and highly available system design
- Solid backend engineering foundation (Go preferred; Python, Java, or C# acceptable)
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:
- Experience with messaging delivery systems, carrier/aggregator integrations, or telecommunications infrastructure
- Expertise in data platform architecture: streaming pipelines, data lakes, warehouses, or distributed analytics
- Background in compliance-heavy environments (healthcare, fintech) with experience navigating regulatory requirements in technical design
- Experience shaping AI/ML infrastructure or integrating AI capabilities into production systems
- History of external technical leadership: open source contributions, conference speaking, or published technical writing
- Strong opinions, loosely held—bringing conviction to technical discussions while remaining genuinely open to better ideas
