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Principal Software Engineer
| Company | ZoomInfo |
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| Location | Bethesda, MD, USA |
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| Salary | $179840 – $247280 |
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| Type | Full-Time |
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| Degrees | |
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| Experience Level | Senior, Expert or higher |
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Requirements
- 5+ years of backend, data, or infrastructure engineering experience (Senior); 8+ years (Principal), or equivalent impact and leadership.
- Strong experience in at least one of the following: Distributed systems engineering (e.g., building low latency high and throughput APIs, scalable microservices, event processing pipelines), Big data infrastructure (e.g., streaming, warehousing, low-latency storage at scale), Applied AI/ML, including use of LLMs for extraction, classification, or reasoning tasks.
- Proficiency in one or more core languages: Java, Go, Python
- Solid grasp of SQL and large-scale data modeling
- Familiarity with databases and tools such as: ClickHouse, DynamoDB, Bigtable, Memcached, Kafka, Kinesis, Firehose, Airflow, Snowflake.
Responsibilities
- Design and build distributed systems that process, enrich, and respond to billions of behavioral events per day in real time
- Develop high-performance APIs and services that support advertising, identity, and intent features across the Marketing Platform
- Leverage machine learning and large language models (LLMs) to analyze behavioral data, classify content, extract signals, and enable intelligent decision-making
- Build intelligent agents using frameworks like LangGraph or MCP to reason over data and power user-facing insights
- Design and operate data pipelines using tools like Kafka, Kinesis, and ClickHouse to support both streaming and batch workloads
- Drive quality, performance, scalability, and observability across all systems you own
- Collaborate cross-functionally with product managers, data scientists, and engineers to deliver customer-facing features and internal tooling
- Contribute to technical leadership and mentorship, especially if operating at the Principal level.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience in ad tech, real-time bidding (RTB), or programmatic systems
- Background in identity resolution, attribution, or behavioral analytics at scale
- Contributions to open source in ML, infrastructure, or data tooling
- Strong product instincts and a passion for building tools that drive meaningful outcomes
