Principal Engineer, Product Engineering

1Password is hiring a Principal Engineer to help define the technical direction for core product experiences. This is a senior individual contributor role for an engineer who can translate ambitious product strategy into systems that scale technically and operationally. You will drive architecture, engineering standards, and technical direction across the product ecosystem, working across client applications, distributed services, data platforms, and shared infrastructure. This is not a role scoped to a single team or subsystem: the expectation is organization-level technical leadership, shaping how Product Engineering approaches complex cross-cutting problems, guiding long-term architectural investments, and establishing the technical patterns and operational standards other teams build against, including the responsible integration of AI capabilities into core product experiences.

Responsibilities

• Define architecture and technical direction for core product capabilities spanning clients, distributed services, data platforms, and shared infrastructure.
• Establish engineering standards and reusable architectural patterns for scalable, maintainable, and resilient product systems.
• Drive long-term technical strategy across critical product areas, balancing immediate delivery needs with scalability, operational excellence, and platform sustainability.
• Guide how AI-powered capabilities are integrated into customer-facing experiences, including evaluation frameworks, rollout safety, telemetry, fallback behavior, auditability, and operational controls.
• Influence key architectural decisions around distributed systems design, event-driven architectures, synchronization models, scalability, performance, reliability, and platform interoperability.
• Help teams navigate difficult technical tradeoffs, unblock large cross-functional initiatives, and reduce systemic engineering complexity.
• Raise the operational bar for production systems through stronger reliability practices, observability standards, incident readiness, and performance analysis.
• Mentor and influence engineers across the organization through architecture reviews, design guidance, and hands-on problem solving.

Qualifications

• You have designed and operated large-scale distributed systems where reliability, scalability, maintainability, and operational excellence matter.
• Deep experience driving architecture and technical direction across multiple teams, organizations, or product domains.
• Strong systems-thinking instincts: platform boundaries, distributed systems constraints, developer ergonomics, and long-term technical sustainability.
• Experience building customer-facing product systems across clients, APIs, distributed services, cloud infrastructure, and data platforms.
• Experience building or scaling event-driven systems, microservices architectures, or shared platform infrastructure in production.
• Practical experience integrating AI or ML capabilities into production applications, with an understanding of the tradeoffs in trust-sensitive product experiences.
• Strong instincts for privacy-preserving and security-conscious system design, including telemetry, user data, permissions, and auditability.
• Clear communication with engineers, executives, and cross-functional partners; comfortable operating in ambiguity and making durable technical decisions before every variable is known.