Principal Software Engineer-SRE

Principal SoftwareEngineer(SRE)-Onshape-Remote US. 

About the Role

Onshape’sSite Reliability Engineering team islooking for aPrincipal Software Engineer to play a critical role in ensuring the long‑term reliability, scalability, and operational excellence of our platform.

As a PrincipalSoftware Engineer, you willoperatewith 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 PrincipalSoftware 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.

WhatYou’llDo:

Own Reliability at Scale

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

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

• Identifysystemic 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 toeliminatemanual 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 asdatastores, 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

WhatWe’reLooking For

Required Experience &Expertise

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

• Ability towork east coast (EST) hours. And be available for on-call rotation once every10 weeks.

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

• Extremely strongproficiencywith the Java programming language and its ecosystem, including building, debugging, andoperatingproduction Java services

• Deep experience operating complex, distributed systems in production environments

• Strong software engineering background, witha track recordof 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

• Experienceoperatingor supporting systems using technologies such asMongoDB,ZooKeeper, andRabbitMQ

• 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 PrincipalSoftware Engineerrole 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.