Principal Software Engineer - Hosting

About Pantheon

Pantheon brings together exceptional builders who take ownership, drive meaningful impact, and shape what's next for the web. We power more than 300,000 websites globally for organizations including Google, Princeton, Salesloft, Clorox, and the United Nations. Every day, thousands of developers and marketers use our WebOps platform to build, iterate, and scale WordPress, Drupal, and Next.js sites that reach billions of people worldwide. As an employer, we operate with the same philosophy that drives our product: foundation and freedom. Pantheon is a vibrant, remote-forward team of experts who care deeply about their craft and results. Here, you take ownership of work that matters, contribute alongside exceptional people, and see the impact you create.

The Role

Pantheon is seeking a Principal Engineer to join our Hosting Platform — the team responsible for the infrastructure powering 700,000+ websites and 17 billion monthly page views. You’ll work at the core of what makes Pantheon run: the systems that provision, serve, and scale sites across our Global CDN, Google Cloud infrastructure, and developer toolchain. 

We're looking for someone who has built or operated infrastructure at scale — at a CDN or edge provider, a developer platform, or a database-as-a-service company — and who brings AI-native instincts to the work: using AI tools to accelerate debugging, automate toil, and make better architectural decisions faster. At Pantheon, AI isn't a feature we're adding — it's how we work. You'll partner across Engineering, Product, and Security to shape the future of our platform, and make decisions that affect how hundreds of thousands of sites are built, deployed, and delivered every day.

What You Need to Succeed 

• Define and drive the technical roadmap for platform reliability, scalability, and performance across hundreds of thousands of sites and billions of monthly requests.
• Architect, build, and evolve the core services underpinning Pantheon’s hosting platform — including edge delivery, container orchestration, database services, and site lifecycle management.
• Partner with product, security, and infrastructure teams to identify root causes and design iterative, high-impact solutions.
• Balance immediate business needs against long-term architectural health, making principled trade-offs that keep the platform sustainable as it scales.
• Provide technical leadership across the engineering organization — setting direction, reviewing designs, and raising the bar for quality, reliability, and operability.
• Mentor and coach engineers at all levels, providing technical guidance and growing engineering talent across the broader organization.
• Contribute to an engineering-wide culture of collaboration, blameless postmortems, and continuous improvement.

What You Bring to the Table

Experience

• 10+ years of software development experience, with significant tenure building platform or infrastructure products
• 5+ years of experience designing and architecting large-scale distributed systems
• Proficiency with container orchestration (Kubernetes), web server technologies (NGINX, PHP, Node.js, or similar), and infrastructure-as-code practices
• Demonstrated ability to own and improve a production platform serving millions of concurrent users or requests
• Proficiency in Go, Python, or equivalent systems-oriented languages

Technical Depth

• Deep expertise in distributed systems design, large-scale service architecture, and cloud-native infrastructure (Pantheon runs on Google Cloud)
• Experience building or operating CDN, edge delivery, or networking-layer systems at scale — including caching strategies, cache invalidation, and edge performance optimization
• Strong understanding of multi-tenant hosting platforms — including the SLO definition, observability, and incident response required to operate them at scale for hundreds of thousands of customer sites
• Experience operating database systems as managed services — relational and non-relational — with appreciation for the operational complexity involved
• AI-native engineering practices — including fluency with AI coding assistants (GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code) and a track record of integrating AI tools into engineering workflows, automation, and architectural decision-making
• Experience building agentic and LLM-powered systems — including task orchestration, prompt engineering, and RAG — with the ability to prototype and ship AI features to production
• Awareness of the infrastructure requirements of AI workloads — including model serving, GPU/accelerator provisioning, inference latency optimization, and cost trade-offs at scale

What We Offer

We have all the usual perks and benefits but what we can really offer you is a fantastic work environment powered by an amazing team.

• Industry competitive compensation and equity plan
• Flexible time off, sick days, and 13 paid holidays
• Comprehensive medical insurance including Health, Dental and Vision
• Paid parental leave (plus fertility, adoption and other family planning benefits)
• In-office workspace (San Francisco & Chicago)
• Monthly allowance for wellness, reading and access to LinkedIn Learning for continued development
• Events and activities both team-based and company wide that inspire, educate and cultivate

Pantheon is an equal opportunity employer and we welcome applications from all backgrounds regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, ancestry, age, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, disability, or any other classification protected by law. Pantheon complies with federal and local disability laws and makes reasonable accommodations for applicants and employees with disabilities. If you need a reasonable accommodation due to a disability for any part of the interview process, please contact talent@pantheon.io. Pursuant to local and federal regulations, Pantheon will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records for employment.

After an offer is made and accepted, E-verify will be utilized to establish your identity and employment eligibility as required by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

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The US base salary range for this position in the United States is $187,200 - $234,000 USD per year. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. At Pantheon, it is not typical for an individual to be hired at or near the top of the range for their role and compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case.

Visa Sponsorship is not available at this time.