Principal Software Engineer (f m d)

📋 Description

• • Architect the next generation of conversational AI at Parloa. In this role you will own the technical vision for a platform that already serves millions of customer interactions per month and is poised to double in size every six months. You will design systems that can scale to 10× current load while maintaining sub-second latency and 99.99 % availability for Fortune-500 clients.
• • Write production-grade code every single day. Whether you are shipping a new real-time event streaming layer in Kafka, refactoring our core intent-classification service, or prototyping a green-field feature in Python/FastAPI, you remain hands-on. Your pull requests set the gold standard for readability, test coverage, and performance benchmarking across the entire engineering org.
• • Lead cross-team architecture initiatives that span Berlin, New York, and remote hubs. You will orchestrate design reviews, threat-modeling sessions, and cost-optimization deep dives with Staff Engineers, Product Managers, and SREs. Expect to influence roadmaps that touch Kubernetes clusters in three Azure regions, MongoDB sharding strategies, and React micro-front-end federation.
• • Balance ruthless short-term velocity with long-term resilience. You will decide when to incur technical debt to win a strategic customer, and when to invest in foundational rewrites that reduce operational cost by 30 %. Your decisions are backed by data—latency SLOs, cost-per-conversation metrics, and customer churn analytics.
• • Mentor and multiply talent across the company. You will run weekly architecture guilds, pair-program with Senior Engineers, and create internal RFC templates that accelerate decision-making. Your mentees regularly level-up to Staff and Principal roles within 18 months.
• • Act as a trusted advisor to the C-suite. You will translate market demands into engineering capacity plans, ensuring we can staff teams fast enough to meet a 3× ARR growth target. You present quarterly architecture QBRs to the board, quantifying risk, ROI, and resourcing trade-offs.
• • Set the cultural tone for fearless iteration and pragmatic perfectionism. You champion “design for tomorrow, build for today,” pushing teams to ship MVPs in weeks while laying extensible foundations. You foster psychological safety so engineers can propose bold ideas without fear of failure.
• • Influence the broader European tech ecosystem. You will represent Parloa at conferences, publish technical blogs on scaling event-driven architectures, and open-source key libraries that become industry standards. Your work helps establish Berlin as the epicenter of trustworthy, enterprise-grade AI engineering.
• • Own the full lifecycle of critical services—from whiteboard sketch to global rollout. You will define SLIs, automate canary deployments with Argo CD, and conduct post-mortems that turn outages into 10× reliability gains. You treat every customer escalation as a learning opportunity that sharpens both code and culture.
• • Drive security and compliance at scale. You will design zero-trust networking patterns, lead GDPR and SOC-2 audits, and embed privacy-by-design into every API endpoint. Your systems pass pen-tests and regulatory reviews without last-minute heroics.
• • Champion data-driven experimentation. You will instrument feature flags, run A/B tests on conversation flows, and iterate based on real-time customer feedback. Your dashboards turn qualitative user pain into quantifiable engineering OKRs.
• • Shape the future of human-AI interaction. You will collaborate with linguists and UX researchers to evolve our dialogue management engine, ensuring that every automated conversation feels natural, context-aware, and brand-consistent across 40 languages.