Principal Software Engineer, Data Persistence
Location: New York, NY
Are you a systems-minded engineer obsessed with consistency, availability, and durability at scale? Do you enjoy working deep in the stack to build resilient, multi-tenant infrastructure that supports real-time mission-critical workloads? Are you excited to contribute to distributed systems that are performant, reliable, and secure—especially when it matters most? If so, we invite you to be a part of our innovative team.
As a Principal Software Engineer on Ridgeline’s Data Persistence team, you will design, build, and evolve the core systems that underpin our data platform—ensuring reliability, performance, and elasticity across a complex, multi-region architecture. You’ll lead major architectural decisions, optimize distributed storage systems, and ensure compliance with strict regulatory standards like SEC and SOC2. This is a high-impact role on a small, specialized team where your work directly enables critical business operations for investment managers. You’ll leverage cutting-edge technologies—including AI-powered tools like GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT—to accelerate development and drive high-quality outcomes at scale.
You must be work authorized in the United States without the need for employer sponsorship.
What will you do?
- Design and evolve our distributed database architecture, including storage engines, query layers, and consistency models.
- Evaluate and optimize write/read paths, indexing strategies, replication mechanisms, and failover recovery techniques.
- Lead the strategic roadmap for how we scale our multi-tenant, microservice-based architecture while ensuring strong guarantees (consistency, availability, durability).
- Partner with product, SRE, and platform teams to shape the future of our persistence, observability, and data access patterns.
- Optimize database infrastructure for cost-efficiency, balancing performance and scalability to improve platform margins at scale.
- Mentor senior engineers and serve as a thought leader across the organization.
Desired Skills and Experience
- 15+ years of experience in software engineering with a strong focus on database systems.
- Have authored or deeply contributed to high-performance distributed systems, databases, or storage engines.
- Possess deep fluency in CAP theorem tradeoffs, Raft/Paxos, LSM vs B-Tree internals, compaction strategies, and query execution plans.
- Have production experience scaling systems that handle TBs–PBs of data across multiple regions or data centers.
- Are comfortable navigating between practical tradeoffs and theoretical foundations in your technical decision-making.
- Can clearly articulate complex systems to diverse audiences and influence engineering direction across orgs.
- Strong hands-on experience with AWS cloud-native architectures, including services like Aurora Global Database, S3, Route53, and lambda.
- Strong experience with database observability tools like Dataddog DBM or equivalent.
- Proficiency in at least one programming language (Kotlin, Java, Python, TypeScript).
Nice to Have
- Contributions to open-source database technologies (e.g., PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, RocksDB).
- Experience with hybrid transactional/analytical processing (HTAP) systems or stream processing architectures.
- Familiarity with emerging trends like vector databases, CRDTs, or columnar storage engines.
- Author, speaker, or deep contributor to technical books, blogs, or conference talks.
About Ridgeline
Ridgeline is the industry cloud platform for investment management. It was founded in 2017 by visionary entrepreneur Dave Duffield (co-founder of both PeopleSoft and Workday) to address the unique technology challenges of an industry in need of new thinking. We are building a modern platform in the public cloud, purpose-built for the investment management industry to empower business like never before.
Headquartered in Lake Tahoe with offices in Reno, Manhattan, and the Bay Area, Ridgeline is proud to have built a fast-growing, people-first company that has been recognized by Fast Company as a “Best Workplace for Innovators,” by LinkedIn as a “Top U.S. Startup,” and by The Software Report as a “Top 100 Software Company.”
Ridgeline is proud to be a community-minded, discrimination-free equal opportunity workplace.
Ridgeline processes the information you submit in connection with your application in accordance with the Ridgeline Applicant Privacy Statement. Please review the Ridgeline Applicant Privacy Statement in full to understand our privacy practices and contact us with any questions.
Compensation and Benefits
The typical starting salary range for new hires in this role is targeted at $255,000 - $300,000. Final compensation amounts are determined by multiple factors, including candidate experience and expertise, and may vary from the amount listed above.
As an employee at Ridgeline, you’ll have many opportunities for advancement in your career and can make a true impact on the product.
In addition to the base salary, 100% of Ridgeline employees can participate in our Company Stock Plan subject to the applicable Stock Option Agreement. We also offer rich benefits that reflect the kind of organization we want to be: one in which our employees feel valued and are inspired to bring their best selves to work. These include unlimited vacation, educational and wellness reimbursements, and $0 cost employee insurance plans. Please check out our Careers page for a more comprehensive overview of our perks and benefits.
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What We Do
Ridgeline has a simple mission: partner with investment management firms to modernize their software. Founded by software industry entrepreneur Dave Duffield, Ridgeline is headquartered in Incline Village, Nevada.
