Principal Software Engineer Lead

Akamai Technologies is hiring a Principal Software Engineer Lead to design and operate the control plane that places, reconciles, and manages virtual machines across its Compute fleet. The role focuses on scaling control-plane state, reconciliation, asynchronous operations, and consistency guarantees.

Responsibilities:

• Defining the database partitioning and sharding strategy to scale control plane state management 5x, with capacity models for placement and inventory state
• Owning the placement reconciliation loop: desired-state model, idempotent reconcilers, drift detection, and reconciliation-lag SLOs
• Generalizing bulk and asynchronous operations into one model with standard operation resources, batching, concurrency caps, and automatic halt on failure thresholds
• Setting consistency guarantees per data path, enforcing idempotency and fencing on controller actions, and specifying saga-style workflows

Requirements:

• 12 years of experience in building distributed systems along with experience in owning control planes or large-scale orchestration or its equivalent
• deep database experience with SQL, including partitioning, sharding, replication, and online schema change
• built asynchronous systems: durable task queues, event-driven workflows, and retry and backpressure design
• hands-on experience building and operating containerized applications, including Kubernetes
• good competence in Python or Go
• deep understanding of consistency (leases, fencing, idempotency, optimistic concurrency) and hands-on experience with reconciliation or controller patterns (Kubernetes-style controllers or equivalent)
• experience with the other or with ColdFusion