Principal Software Engineer-SRE

Principal Software Engineer (SRE)-Onshape-Remote US.  

About the Role 

Onshape’s Site Reliability Engineering team is looking for a Principal Software Engineer to play a critical role in ensuring the long‑term reliability, scalability, and operational excellence of our platform. 

As a Principal Software Engineer, you will operate with a high degree of autonomy and influence. You will lead complex, cross‑organization reliability initiatives, shape reliability strategy, and serve as a technical authority and trusted advisor across engineering. 

Your work will directly shape the experience of our customers by ensuring the platform is fast, resilient, and dependable. As a Principal Software Engineer, you will help protect customer trust by driving reliability across the entire system lifecycle. 

This role is ideal for engineers who enjoy solving ambiguous, high‑impact problems at scale, influencing system design across teams, and raising the reliability bar for an entire organization. 

What You’ll Do:

Own Reliability at Scale 

• Lead design, implementation, and evolution of reliability, availability, and resiliency strategies for large‑scale distributed systems written primarily in Java 

• Apply deep experience operating complex, distributed systems to guide architectural decisions, reliability strategies, and long‑term system evolution 

• Identify systemic risks in application architecture, data flows, and infrastructure, and drive architectural improvements that measurably improve availability, performance, and scalability 

• Set and evolve reliability standards, best practices, and operational principles across R&D 

Drive Operational Excellence 

• Lead efforts to prevent, detect, and mitigate incidents through technical improvements and operational maturity 

• Serve as a senior coordination point during major incidents, helping manage response and guide long‑term remediation 

• Champion blameless post-incident reviews and ensure learnings translate into durable system improvements 

Reduce Toil Through Engineering 

• Apply advanced software engineering practices to eliminate manual work, reduce operational load, and improve system observability 

• Design and build internal platforms, automation, and tooling that support Java‑based services and their operational needs 

• Raise the bar on monitoring, alerting, and SLO/SLI adoption across systems 

Lead Through Influence and Collaboration 

• Partner deeply with product engineers, architects, and engineering leadership to ensure reliability and operability are first‑class concerns in system design 

• Review and influence designs for complex systems involving technologies such as datastores, messaging systems, and coordination services 

• Serve as a technical mentor and coach for SREs and other engineers, raising overall engineering and operational maturity 

Shape Strategy and Direction 

• Contribute to longer‑term reliability and infrastructure strategy aligned with business growth 

• Stay current with industry trends in SRE, distributed systems, and the Java ecosystem, turning insights into practical improvements 

• Help define what “great reliability” looks like for the organization and how we measure it 

What We’re Looking For 

Required Experience & Expertise 

• US Citizenship or Permanent Residents only due to ITAR requirements. 

• Ability to work east coast (EST) hours.  And be available for on-call rotation once every 10 weeks. 

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, site reliability engineering, or systems engineering roles 

• Extremely strong proficiency with the Java programming language and its ecosystem, including building, debugging, and operating production Java services 

• Deep experience operating complex, distributed systems in production environments 

• Strong software engineering background, with a track record of delivering high‑quality, maintainable code 

Technical Strength 

• Expert understanding of incident management, service reliability, and performance engineering 

• Strong hands‑on experience with observability (metrics, logs, traces), capacity planning, and SLO‑driven reliability 

• Deep familiarity with modern cloud‑based infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure‑as‑code practices 

• Ability to reason about failure modes across application, data, and infrastructure layers 

Leadership & Influence 

• Demonstrated ability to lead complex initiatives that span teams and organizational boundaries 

• Comfortable making high‑impact technical decisions in ambiguous environments 

• Strong communicator who can influence design and operational decisions across a wide range of stakeholders 

Mindset 

• Systems thinker focused on root‑cause analysis and durable fixes 

• Calm and effective under pressure, especially during high‑severity incidents 

• Curious, data‑driven, and committed to continuous improvement 

Nice to Have 

• Experience operating or supporting systems using technologies such as MongoDB, ZooKeeper, and RabbitMQ 

• Background in performance tuning and scalability optimization of Java services 

• Experience setting or influencing engineering standards at the organization level 

• Prior involvement in evolving SRE or platform practices in a growing engineering organization 

• Experience designing, operating, or scaling systems in cloud environments such as AWS (preferred), including familiarity with core services, networking models, and reliability features 

Why This Role Matters:

The Principal Software Engineer role is critical to ensuring our platform continues to meet the reliability expectations of our customers as we grow. Your work will have a broad and lasting impact—not only on individual systems, but on how reliability and operational excellence are approached across engineering.