Principal Engineer, Quizlet
Platform Architecture & Core Reliability
$260-320k
+ stock options
More information about location
3 days a week in office
Learning tools for students and teachers
Be an early applicant
Learning tools for students and teachers
201-500 employees
Be an early applicant
$260-320k
+ stock options
More information about location
3 days a week in office
201-500 employees
Company mission
Quizlet's mission is to give every student the tools and confidence to succeed, no matter their motivation or what they’re striving to achieve.
Role
Who you are
- Deep technical mastery and hands-on experience across three or more of the following high-leverage domains with 10+ years of experience in software development, site reliability engineering, or platform engineering
- A proven track record of driving significant architectural outcomes as a Principal or Staff Engineer in a high-scale platform or infrastructure role
- Global Scale & Resilience: A history of scaling consumer-facing systems that reliably handle tens of thousands of requests per second (RPS) and successfully achieving high-availability targets across multi-region cloud environments
- Data Systems: Deep expertise in architecting and optimizing complex data backbones involving transactional, globally consistent (e.g., Cloud Spanner / PlanetScale), and analytical systems (BigQuery)
- Container Orchestration & Networking: Strong operational knowledge of Kubernetes (GKE) orchestration layered with a Service Mesh (Istio), including traffic shaping, security, and performance tuning
- Developer Velocity Tooling: Proven ability to design and implement automated CI/CD pipelines leveraging tools like GitHub Actions, CircleCI, and ArgoCD, with a track record of successfully deploying AI developer tools and workflows
- Observability & Incident Management: Mastery in implementing comprehensive monitoring using Datadog for defining SLOs and performing deep-dive investigations, and a strong background in leading structured incident response using tools like Jeli
- Cloud Architecture: Extensive experience in designing and optimizing large-scale cloud-native architecture on GCP (or equivalent cloud providers), including network optimization (e.g., Cloudflare integration) and infrastructure cost management
What the job involves
- We're hiring a Principal Engineer to lead critical architectural decisions that establish industry-leading standards for reliability and operational excellence
- This is a high-leverage, hands-on role focused on optimizing performance, driving engineering velocity, and leading systemic architectural change
- The role reports to the Senior Director of Technical Infrastructure
- Platform Reliability (SLO Focus): Lead the strategy and implementation necessary to achieve and maintain our 99.95% availability target. This includes evolving our multi-region deployment strategy and optimizing for resilience under sustained, high-volume traffic
- Data Backbone Scaling: Define the architectural approach for scaling our core data systems, optimizing performance across Cloud Spanner, PlanetScale MySQL, and BigQuery
- Compute & Service Mesh: Drive performance and efficiency improvements across our managed compute environment, specifically optimizing Kubernetes (GKE) clusters and managing the performance and operational complexity of Istio
- Developer Velocity & CI/CD: Architect high-leverage internal platforms, designing the pipelines across tools like GitHub Actions, CircleCI, and ArgoCD, and driving organizational influence to standardize high-velocity, safe deployment practices
- Incident & Learning Culture: Drive reliability change across the engineering organization by leveraging deep-dive analysis of incidents (Jeli) and proactive monitoring (Datadog), improving operational practices, and influencing architectural design decisions
- Performance & Cost Engineering: Act as a technical owner for the cost-per-request metric, identifying and implementing architectural efficiencies (caching, connection pooling, resource utilization) that scale down infrastructure spend while maintaining service speed
Our take
Quizlet has built a large-scale business around simple-to-share and simple-to-use products. Its free flashcard maker helps students prepare for exams. Those insights fuel Quizlet Plus, the startup’s subscription product that charges an annual fee for access to more features, including tutoring services.
After a long period of runaway growth, during which the company achieved a $1 billion valuation, Quizlet has been somewhat buffered by the general market downturn affecting the tech sector in 2022, which hit EdTech particularly heavily. It has responded by a shakeup of its leadership team, appointing AirBnB and Starship Technologies veteran Lex Bayer.
With an entrepreneurial management team and a strong user base of over 60 million students and teachers, Quizlet seems likely to weather the current economic situation and resume its growth in the near future.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
75% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 3 rounds)
May 2020
$30m
SERIES C
Feb 2018
$20m
SERIES B
Total funding: $62m
Company benefits
- Comprehensive health, dental, vision and disability plans for you and your family. 100% paid premiums for employees, 75% for dependents
- 20 days of PTO, 10 paid holidays, and 5 volunteer days
- Generous family leave plan
- $1,000 stipend each year for professional development
- $100/month reimbursement towards wellness, plus memberships to physical & mental health resources
- Stock options
- 401k match
- Free lunch and dinner, healthy snacks & drinks daily
- Commuter Benefits - we'll help cover 50% of your public commuter & parking costs, plus pre-tax FSA.
Company HQ
China Basin, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Dave Margulius
(Board Member)Currently Advisor at Law Students for Climate Accountability. Previously on the Board of Directors at Churchill Club and Founder at Enterprise Insight.
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