Principal Software Engineer - Capella Control Plane
About the role
Couchbase, the operational data platform for AI, is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to join the Control Plane team. The role is located in San Jose, California (hybrid - in office at least 3 days/week).
Responsibilities
Define and evolve the control plane architecture for scalability, reliability, performance, and security.
Develop and deliver production-quality Golang code for critical Capella platform services.
Architect and optimize multi-cloud deployments, networking models, VPC/VNet peering, load balancing, and secure connectivity across AWS, GCP, and Azure.
Build and scale multi-tenant control plane services that orchestrate cluster lifecycle across providers.
Define and implement monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting standards for operational excellence.
Lead design and delivery of core platform capabilities such as provisioning, lifecycle management, and security controls.
Tackle ambiguous distributed systems challenges involving scaling, networking, and performance.
Exercise cross-team technical authority, partnering with product, SRE, Quality Engineering, operations, and global engineering teams across geographies to align technical direction with business goals.
Maintain working knowledge of web UI architecture and partner effectively with frontend engineers on end-to-end control plane workflows.
Guide engineers across levels, perform code reviews, and set a high bar for engineering culture.
Research and evaluate cloud-native technologies, frameworks, and architectures for Capella's evolution.
Requirements
Expertise in Golang with proven experience building distributed, cloud-native systems.
Strong knowledge of system design, high availability, fault tolerance, and performance tuning.
Hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Azure), including networking (VPCs, routing, load balancing, firewalls, private connectivity) and Kubernetes/container orchestration.
Experience designing and building control plane and platform components for SaaS platforms at scale.
Proven experience leading cross-team architecture and platform decisions in complex, ambiguous cloud and distributed systems environments.
Working knowledge of web UI architecture and ability to partner effectively with frontend engineers on end-to-end control plane workflows.
Experience mentoring engineers and driving org-level influence on engineering culture and standards.
Qualifications
Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
At least 12+ years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 5+ years in cloud/distributed systems.
Prior principal or staff engineer-level experience leading architecture and platform initiatives in cloud infrastructure or large-scale SaaS environments.
Skills
Expertise in Golang
System design and high availability
Cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Azure)
Kubernetes/container orchestration
Control plane and platform components for SaaS platforms
Web UI architecture
Mentoring engineers
Benefits
Generous Time Off Program
Wellness Benefits
Retirement program
Business Travel Insurance
Fun Perks