NetBox Labs is looking for a Principal/Staff Engineer to join our OCTO team. This is a hands-on, high-impact individual contributor role providing deep architectural and technical leadership across our entire product platform. You will shape the long-term architecture for our SaaS and on-prem offerings, balancing high-level system design with grounded collaboration across engineering.
What You'll Do
- Drive holistic software architecture across teams and domains, aligning technical direction with product goals and user value.
- Design and evaluate systems architecture for scalability, flexibility, and maintainability.
- Guide how teams structure technical domains, boundaries, contracts, and composition.
- Lead architectural SIGs and design reviews to foster cross-functional alignment and learning.
- Help lead foundational modeling choices, from normalized relational schemas to flexible document stores and protobuf-based APIs.
- Collaborate across teams on system decomposition, interface design, and evolution of distributed services.
- Write clear, actionable proposals and architecture documents with diagrams and tradeoff analysis.
- Mentor and support engineers across teams to drive good architectural outcomes within their domains.
What We're Looking For
- 10+ years of experience designing and building production-grade systems.
- Proven success leading architectural direction across multiple teams.
- Strong understanding of software architecture principles, including domain boundaries, modular design, and decoupled interfaces.
- Familiarity with distributed systems and microservice architecture patterns.
- Experience designing data models and APIs, including REST and gRPC, with awareness of schema evolution and compatibility.
- Strong CS fundamentals—data structures, algorithms, consistency models, etc.
- Expertise with modern backend technologies and data systems (e.g., PostgreSQL, Redis, ClickHouse).
- Proficiency in Python and Go.
- A pragmatic, enablement-first mindset: drive alignment, not control.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills with ability to articulate complex technical ideas to diverse audiences.
Technical Stack
- Databases & Data: PostgreSQL, Redis, ClickHouse
- Languages: Python, Go
Team & Environment
You will report directly to the CTO and work closely across engineering, product, and leadership teams.
We own and solve problems with high attention to detail. Our open source contributors, users, customers & team are all part of our community—when our community wins, we win. We prioritize simplicity and think twice before adding complexity. Clear communication helps keep our team aligned and collaborating smoothly.
