Principal Software Engineer, Distributed Systems - Alteryx

Meet the Moment with Alteryx

We're living through a once-in-a-generation shift in how work gets done. Data, automation, and AI are quickly becoming the center of every business decision - and Alteryx is leading the transformation.

You'll be working on the challenges that sit at the heart of modern business. No matter your role, the work you do will help organizations move faster, see more clearly, and tackle questions that used to feel impossible.

If you're ready to meet the moment with innovation, curiosity, and excellence, there's a place for you here.

Alteryx is searching for a Principal Engineer . This position is remote-friendly.

Position Overview:

We are looking for a highly autonomous, senior architect to drive, review, and own the software architecture for our core platform. This person will be the technical conscience for large-scale, distributed systems, and will collaborate closely with engineering leads, product owners, and infrastructure teams. You will design, evolve, and enforce architectural standards and patterns; lead cross-cutting initiatives; and mentor other engineers. At this level, we expect you to operate with minimal handholding, you will influence and make tough technical decisions, resolve tradeoffs, and bring clarity to ambiguity.

Primary Responsibilities:

Define, evolve, and own the architectural vision and roadmaps for the major platform domains (e.g. orchestration, job execution, data pipelines, sidecar services).

Perform architecture reviews, assess proposals from teams, and vet designs for adherence to standards, scalability, performance, reliability, and security.

Lead or contribute hands-on to critical subsystems (e.g. orchestrator, scheduling, service mesh, job pipelines, stateful services).

Drive and enforce cross-team architectural patterns.

Provide thought leadership: prototype proofs-of-concept, evaluate new tools/technologies, bring innovation into the platform.

Mentor and coach architects, senior engineers, and guide teams through architectural change.

Collaborate with infrastructure, operations, SRE, security, and DevOps to ensure the architecture is operable, observable, and maintainable in production.

Help define and lead architecture governance (e.g. architecture review board, reference architectures, standards, guidelines).

Participate in tech strategy, roadmap planning with product & engineering leadership.

Diagnose and resolve technical debt or architectural “smells” across the codebase, enforcing consistency.

Qualifications:

Experience : ~10+ (or more) years of software engineering experience, with at least 3–5 years in senior architect or principal-level roles (or equivalent).

Proven track record of designing and operating large-scale, distributed systems in a production environment.

Deep hands-on exper