Principal Software Engineer

See yourself at Twilio

Join the team as our next Principal Software Engineer, Special Projects Group.

Who we are & why we’re hiring

Twilio powers real-time business communications and data solutions that help companies and developers worldwide build better applications and customer experiences.

Although we're headquartered in San Francisco, we have presence throughout South America, Europe, Asia and Australia. We're on a journey to becoming a global company that actively opposes racism and all forms of oppression and bias. At Twilio, we support diversity, equity & inclusion wherever we do business.

About the job

This position is needed to help launch a new LLM powered application from prototype to production.

This new product will leverage the power of Twilio CustomerAI to create a new developer platform that allows builders to rapidly build personalized interactions for all customers.

As a founding member of this team, the challenges will be great and the path will not always be clear.  We are seeking a principal software engineer to help ensure we are making the right trade offs on our path to product market fit while laying a strong foundation for our future success.  The right candidate is always willing to roll up their sleeves to get the job done and is excited to dive into any challenge we throw their way.

Responsibilities

In this role, you’ll:

• Design clean interfaces between platform services and applications
• Develop fault tolerant systems to communicate with 3rd party APIs in a trusted and scalable manner.
• Collect information from 3rd party sources and expose that information directly to internal LLM systems.
• Create methods for interfacing with and monitoring the performance of non-deterministic, LLM powered applications.
• Collaborate with subject matter experts, fellow developers, and internal stakeholders to turn business goals into achievable technical roadmaps
• Drive operational excellence, maintaining robust uptime and enabling continuous delivery
• Mentor engineers on the team, leading projects, sharing domain knowledge, and positively influencing their careers

Qualifications 

Not all applicants will have skills that match a job description exactly. Twilio values diverse experiences in other industries, and we encourage everyone who meets the required qualifications to apply. While having “desired” qualifications make for a strong candidate, we encourage applicants with alternative experiences to also apply. If your career is just starting or hasn't followed a traditional path, don't let that stop you from considering Twilio. We are always looking for people who will bring something new to the table!

Required:

• Strong customer focus, taking the time to really understand their needs and ensure we are solving their problems.
• Ability to adapt to new technologies and quickly become an expert in those technologies 
• Experience moving quickly in a fast paced, startup environment.
• 7+ years of experience writing production-grade code in a modern programming language
• A solid understanding of networking, infrastructure, and Kubernetes 
• Ability to balance long-term objectives with urgent short-term needs, helping your engineering partners make good decisions.
• Solid programming skills in a modern language (ex: Go) and modern protocol stacks (ex: gRPC, Websockets, Thrift)
• Experience maintaining and operating always-on cloud services
• Demonstrated commitment to seeking diverse viewpoints and acting with intention to create an inclusive team environment
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.  Your knowledge is only as good as your ability to share it!  
• Schedule: Ability to work non-standard, on-call rotation weekend and holiday hours, shared evenly with all engineers on the team. We believe that we are responsible for the code we write and how it runs in production

Desired:

• Experience working with LLMs handling production workloads
• Experience managing AWS infrastructure
• Experience with relational and vector databases

Location 

This role will be remote and based in the U.S.

No mandatory travel anticipated. 

What We Offer

There are many benefits to working at Twilio, including, in addition to competitive pay, things like generous time-off, ample parental and wellness leave, healthcare, a retirement savings program, and much more.