Principal Software Engineer, CloudBees

• 12+ years of relevant software engineering experience, including technical leadership at Staff or Principal scope and a track record of delivering complex software platforms
• Deep Java expertise, including JVM behavior, concurrency, memory management, classloading, and source and bytecode compatibility. You can investigate unfamiliar code and explain why a system behaves the way it does
• Experience building and supporting distributed systems running on Kubernetes in production. You can explain the architectural tradeoffs, failure modes, and what you changed when things went wrong
• Strong distributed-systems knowledge, including concurrency, event-driven architectures, message buses, and failure handling
• A track record of improving established codebases through thoughtful refactoring, architectural simplification, and measurable improvements to performance or reliability
• Current, hands-on coding experience. You regularly contribute code that reaches production and can take difficult changes through testing and release
• Experience setting technical direction across teams, leading complex initiatives, and developing other senior engineers through design discussions, code review, and mentorship
• A strong understanding of CI/CD and developer workflows, with the ability to connect technical decisions to customer needs, delivery speed, and product quality
• Clear communication and the ability to influence engineering, product, and senior stakeholders through evidence, explicit tradeoffs, and sound reasoning
• You think like a technical founder: you own outcomes for the product area and follow problems through to resolution
• You bring high emotional intelligence to technical leadership. You challenge designs constructively, invite dissent, and change your mind when the evidence changes
• You prefer simple, robust solutions and practical progress. You balance urgency with the compatibility, security, and reliability customers depend on
• Customer Obsessed — You treat customer problems as your own and build relationships with the people behind the logo, not just the account. You can point to decisions you changed because of what a customer told you
• High Agency — You own problems beyond your job description and move without waiting to be asked. When the path isn't defined, you make the call and bring people with you rather than working around them
• Truth Seeking — You hold a strong point of view and update it when the data says otherwise. You argue for the best answer regardless of who's in the room, and once a decision is made, you commit to it fully
• Hard Work — You own the end result, not just your slice of it, and you go beyond what's expected to get there. You work smart as well as hard, and you find real reward in building something demanding alongside people who do the same
• Ship Excellence — You hold a painfully high quality bar and keep raising it, while shipping with urgency instead of waiting for perfect. Every iteration is something you learn from
• Direct Feedback — You give honest, constructive feedback regardless of seniority or tenure, and you actively ask for it in return. You deliver it with enough care that people want to hear it from you

Desirable

• CloudBees CI helps enterprises build and deliver software with confidence. Built on Jenkins, with a core written in Java and deployments running on Kubernetes, it brings together the challenges of distributed systems, an extensible plugin ecosystem, and the reliability customers expect from critical delivery infrastructure
• We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to set technical direction for the CloudBees CI product area and turn that direction into working software. You will lead architecture and execution across teams while staying close to the code: solving the hardest engineering problems, improving an established codebase, and helping other engineers do their best work
• You bring deep expertise in Java, Kubernetes, and distributed systems, together with a product mindset. You understand that an architectural decision is only valuable if it improves the customer's experience. You know when to simplify, when to invest in a deeper change, and how to move an established product forward without compromising the workflows customers depend on
• Build a deep understanding of the existing CloudBees CI architecture, Jenkins internals, and customer workloads. Use that evidence to identify the changes that will make the greatest difference
• Define the technical roadmap with engineering and product partners, connecting architectural investments to customer needs and measurable improvements in reliability, performance, and maintainability
• Lead the design of resilient distributed systems running on Kubernetes. Make tradeoffs around scale, failure handling, compatibility, and operational complexity explicit, and document the reasoning behind key decisions
• Write production-quality Java and own critical refactors, performance improvements, and stability fixes. Lead difficult changes from design through testing, release, and follow-up
• Diagnose complex JVM and distributed-system problems, including memory leaks, thread contention, classloading issues, and failures that emerge across components
• Evolve plugin-based architectures and service boundaries while protecting compatibility and upgrade behavior. Simplify where possible and introduce new abstractions only when they solve a clear problem
• Earn the trust of an established engineering team. Listen first, explain your reasoning, and build alignment through technical judgment and working code
• Drive initiatives across teams by breaking ambiguous problems into achievable milestones, coordinating dependencies, anticipating risks, and unblocking delivery
• Lead rigorous design and code reviews. Mentor Staff and other senior engineers, share knowledge, and establish engineering standards that teams can apply consistently
• Strengthen secure coding, automated unit and integration testing, and release practices. Ensure changes are tested against realistic workflows, failure modes, and upgrade scenarios
• Use profiling, metrics, logs, and incident evidence to find root causes and validate improvements. Turn recurring problems into durable fixes and better engineering practices
• Partner with support, product, and engineering colleagues to resolve complex customer issues. Improve the feedback loop from code to customer, removing delivery bottlenecks while maintaining confidence in each release
• The opportunity to shape the technical direction of CloudBees CI, with hands-on ownership of consequential engineering work
• A global, collaborative team that takes its craft seriously, shares knowledge, and invests in each other's growth