Hybrid Principal Engineer – Cloud and Datacenter Software

at Intel Corporation

• Job title: Principal Engineer – Cloud and Datacenter Software
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Lead
• Salary: $233,990 - $330,340 per year
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Tech skills: Cloud, MySQL, Open Source, Postgres, Spark, Go
• Location requirements: Hybrid, Hillsboro, United States

About the role

• Principal Engineer shaping future datacenter and cloud software at Intel. Engaging with customers and leading architectural optimization in cloud and on-premise environments.

Responsibilities

• Engage directly with major customers to understand their use cases, application architectures, and performance critical needs, translating these into actionable architecture and optimization strategies.
• Influence and define technical direction across Intel and the industry as a recognized domain expert, acting as a change agent and role model for Intel values.
• Lead the architecture and optimization of customer workloads across cloud, on premise, and hyperscale environments, leveraging Intel platform software, industry software, compilers, tools, libraries, and frameworks.
• Mentor and develop junior technical leaders, grow the technical community, and align organizational goals with a cohesive technical vision.
• Identify and define opportunities for future architecture optimizations, including NUMA, cache awareness, branch prediction, and other advancements tailored for next generation Intel platforms.
• Help drive Intel's participation and leadership in opensource communities (e.g., Spark, Postgres, MySQL, Go, zstd) and identify areas where deeper engagement will strengthen the ecosystem.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or equivalent industry experience.
• 10+ years of experience developing or architecting workloads or software frameworks, with 5+ in cloud and data center.
• 3+ years of direct customer-facing experience.
• Demonstrated expertise in workload optimization, profiling tools, and cloud software architecture.
• Master's degree or PhD in a relevant technical field (preferred).
• Experience communicating with customers, technical teams, and management to gather requirements, analyze workloads, design experiments, and propose optimizations (preferred).
• Documented contributions to the cloud technology industry (e.g., whitepapers, conference presentations, patents, code contributions, technical blogs) (preferred).
• Familiarity with performance tooling, compiler technologies, software libraries, and workload profiling methodologies (preferred).
• Expertise in one or more cloud workload categories such as data services, web, AI, storage or media workloads (preferred).
• Ability to optimize workloads for future Intel architectures (preferred).

Benefits

• competitive pay
• stock bonuses
• benefit programs which include health, retirement, and vacation