Principal + Staff Software Engineers

The role

Staff and Principal Software Engineers will define the architectural foundation for enterprise data transformation for LLM applications. You will own the technical direction for the core platform, building distributed systems and managing Kubernetes orchestration.

What you will do

• Define and evolve the end-to-end architecture for the data transformation and retrieval platform.
• Build and scale distributed systems for massive volumes of unstructured data.
• Serve as the company-wide authority on Kubernetes orchestration, cluster design, and reliability.
• Lead Python architecture and best practices.
• Design and optimize Postgres schemas, queries, and indexing strategies.
• Mentor senior engineers through design reviews and code guidance.
• Partner with infrastructure and product teams to translate research prototypes into production-grade systems.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and open-source tools in LLM infrastructure, retrieval, and orchestration.

Required qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience with a focus on distributed systems, infrastructure, or data architecture.
• Python expert capable of building frameworks and performance-critical services from scratch.
• Deep Kubernetes expertise in design, deployment, and debugging at scale.
• Fluent in Postgres including query planning, partitioning, and tuning.
• Experience in high-performance data or AI/ML systems involving retrieval pipelines, embeddings, or hybrid workloads.

Nice to have

• Experience building or scaling LLM-powered or RAG systems in production.
• Familiarity with open-source orchestration frameworks, vector databases, or hybrid cloud infrastructure.
• Contributions to open-source projects in Python, Kubernetes, or distributed systems.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision coverage through Justworks.
• Fertility coverage and access to One Medical, Talkspace, Kindbody, and Teladoc.
• $250/month allowance if medical coverage is waived.
• 401(k) with company match (100% of the first 3% and 50% of the next 2%).
• Company-paid life insurance.
• Optional supplemental life, short- and long-term disability, accident, critical illness, and hospital coverage.
• FSA and HSA options.
• Stock options.
• Flexible paid time off (unlimited).
• Up to 80 hours of paid sick leave a year.
• 12 company holidays and a company-wide winter break.
• 16 weeks of fully paid parental leave, plus up to 6 additional unpaid weeks.

About the company

Unstructured is defining the standard for enterprise data transformation in the age of LLMs and generative AI. Their open-source toolkit is used by 90% of the Fortune 1000.