Principal Engineer (Cloud-Native Distributed Systems)

Location: Illinois, United States; remote/hybrid

Salary: $210,000–$314,000 per year, plus annual performance bonus and long-term incentives

Company

hirify.global builds AI-powered cloud software for legal data intelligence, helping law firms, corporations, and government agencies organize and analyze complex information for litigation, investigations, compliance, and data breach response.

What you will do

• Design and architect secure, scalable full-stack cloud services processing petabytes of data weekly.
• Resolve complex cross-organizational technical problems through hands-on implementation and collaboration.
• Define organization-wide technical vision, architecture, platform strategy, and data strategy.
• Establish and drive adoption of standards for scalability, reliability, maintainability, security, testability, and flexibility.
• Lead the evolution of Enrichment from batch-oriented pipelines to streaming-first, continuously processing workflows handling 1K to 1B+ files.
• Develop best practices, guardrails, and tooling for AI-assisted and agentic engineering while designing, implementing, reviewing, operating, and supporting production systems.

Requirements

• 12+ years of experience designing, building, and operating complex cloud-native distributed systems.
• Recognized authority in architecture and distributed systems, with experience defining organization-wide technical standards.
• Deep expertise in high-throughput data processing and transformation at scale, including batch or streaming systems.
• Experience with durable workflow and orchestration engines such as Temporal, event-driven architectures, and container-based compute such as Kubernetes.
• Strong grounding in reliability, performance, security, observability, and strict SLOs.
• Proven ability to influence senior and executive stakeholders, align technical vision with company strategy, and mentor engineers.

Nice to have

• Experience with legal technology, AI-enabled platforms, or regulated domains.
• Experience designing or scaling streaming systems using Event Hub, Kafka, Apache Spark, or similar frameworks.
• Experience with enterprise UI/UX, system, or data architecture.
• Familiarity with GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code, or similar AI-development tools.
• External thought leadership or industry contributions.

Culture & Benefits

• Continuous delivery, strong observability, and end-to-end engineering ownership.
• Exposure across distributed systems and AI-enabled workflows.
• Health and retirement programs, wellness resources, and discretionary time off.
• Parental leave, two annual company breaks, a home office stipend, and an equity program.
• Volunteer opportunities and company-sponsored charitable programs.