Principal Engineer

At NetBox Labs, we’re building the future of network automation. Our products power the network and infrastructure management for thousands of organizations, from fast-growing startups to global enterprises. We’re now looking for a Principal Engineer to join our Engineering leadership team. In this senior IC role, you will report directly to the CTO and work cross-functionally across engineering, product, and customer teams to ensure architectural cohesion across our growing product portfolio.

You’ll provide technical leadership on key design and architecture decisions across multiple product lines and will guide our investments in areas including security, infrastructure, data platform, and platform design. This is a hands-on technical leadership role focused on long-term impact, technical mentorship, and strategic architecture across the organization - not through top-down authority, but by enabling and supporting engineers within their areas of ownership to succeed.

• Help establish architectural foundations and leverage for an expansive product vision

• Serve as a senior engineering leader, collaborating with stakeholders to shape the long-term technical direction of our SaaS, on-prem, and open source products.

• Partner with engineering leadership and product managers to evolve the technical roadmap across multiple product areas.

• Facilitate and lead architectural SIGs, driving alignment on key design decisions.

• Guide foundational system design in collaboration with platform, observability, and core product teams.

• Drive architectural thinking in emerging areas including AI and internal data platform strategy.

• Influence engineering culture through design reviews, mentorship, and technical guidance.

What you'll bring

• Prior experience working in a high-growth startup environment, with the ability to thrive in fast-paced and ambiguous settings.

• 10+ years of experience building and designing distributed systems at scale.

• Experience with application and information security practices and standards, especially OWASP, NIST, and SOC 2 compliance frameworks.

• Proficiency in Python (including Django) and/or Go; ability to work across multiple tech stacks.

• Strong experience with AWS and Kubernetes.

• Experience leading cross-functional architecture efforts and influencing technical direction across teams.

• Strong communication skills and ability to collaborate with engineering and business stakeholders.

• Prior experience mentoring senior engineers and leading design discussions.

• Experience with AI tools (e.g. Copilot, ChatGPT, Cursor)

• Core: Python, Django, Go, gRPC, microservices/serverless, event driven architecture

• Data: PostgreSQL, Redis, ClickHouse, CDC, message brokers

• Infra: Kubernetes, Helm, Docker, AWS

• Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry

• CI/CD: GitHub Actions, Terraform

• We own and solve problems with high attention to detail.

• Our open source contributors, users, customers & team are all part of our community. When our community wins, we win.

• We prioritize simplicity and think twice before adding complexity

• Clear communication helps keep our team aligned and collaborating smoothly.

NetBox Labs helps companies build and manage complex networks. We help customers accelerate network automation by delivering open, composable products and supporting the network automation community.

NetBox Labs is the commercial steward of open source NetBox, the world’s most popular network source of truth, and Orb, the next-generation open source network observability platform. Our products include NetBox Enterprise, a fully supported self-managed NetBox with advanced features, and NetBox Cloud, a secure, scalable, and reliable SaaS edition of NetBox.

NetBox powers thousands of companies, and NetBox Labs is backed by investment from Notable Capital (formerly GGV), Grafana Labs CEO Raj Dutt, Flybridge, IBM, Salesforce Ventures, and Mango Capital.