Principal Engineer

Overview

Title:

Principal Engineer

Location:

Hybrid, Nashville TN

Compensation: $190,000 – $240,000 + equity (range dependent on experience)

Eligibility: U.S. residents only (due to privacy tech compliance requirements)

About Us:

360 Privacy is a leading SaaS company committed to protecting digital privacy for high-profile individuals and organizations. Our platform enables privacy, security, and anonymity online. As we scale, we are investing deeply in the quality, stability, and long-term evolution of our core systems.

We operate in a space where trust is earned through reliability and thoughtful system design. Backend systems must remain understandable, resilient, and safe to evolve as the business grows. Core Engineering plays a central role in making that possible.

We are hiring a Principal Engineer to own and guide the technical direction of our core backend systems. This is a hands-on design and leadership role for an engineer operating at true principal scope. You will shape architecture, make high-impact decisions under uncertainty, and ensure those decisions hold up in production.

Security is a constant consideration in this role. Systems are expected to be secure by default, resistant to misuse, and explicit about trust boundaries. Security is treated as a core design constraint alongside correctness, performance, and maintainability.

While this role carries architectural authority, success depends on collaboration. You will work closely with other engineers, as well as product and security partners, to drive clarity, build shared understanding, and raise the quality bar across the organization.

This role requires comfort with ambiguity, steady judgment under pressure, and the ability to balance long-term system health with near-term delivery.

• Own backend architecture across core services, including APIs and data access layers
• Define and uphold standards for API design, system boundaries, and data modeling
• Lead the design and implementation of complex backend initiatives from concept through production
• Own and evolve cross-cutting backend concerns such as authorization, tenant isolation, idempotency, request governance, and secure data access patterns
• Drive system quality by improving evolvability, operational confidence, and long-term maintainability
• Make and document high-impact architectural decisions, including explicit trade-offs and risk assessments
• Collaborate closely with engineers and cross-functional partners to align on design, constraints, and long-term direction
• Mentor engineers through design reviews, architectural guidance, and clear technical feedback
• Partner with engineering leadership on long-term technical strategy and technology investment decisions
• Participate in on-call rotation approximately once every two months and translate operational learnings into system improvements

• Strong architectural judgment and the ability to reason clearly about complex systems
• Comfort making decisions with incomplete information and revisiting them as systems evolve
• Ability to design APIs and data models that are explicit, constrained, and difficult to misuse
• Habit of writing things down, including design rationale, trade-offs, and operational considerations
• Security-first thinking that treats trust boundaries, failure modes, and misuse as design inputs
• Ability to mentor engineers through thoughtful feedback rather than prescriptive direction
• Collaborative mindset that values shared understanding and durable solutions over individual heroics
• Operational awareness and curiosity about how systems behave under real-world conditions

• 8+ years of backend engineering experience, including ownership of production systems at scale
• Proven experience designing backend APIs and services that are intentionally difficult to misuse
• Strong data modeling skills and experience building multi-tenant systems with clear tenant isolation
• Demonstrated ownership of architectural decisions with measurable impact on system stability and delivery
• Ability to lead technical work through written design documents, diagrams, and decision records
• Comfort operating under ambiguity and making decisions that meaningfully constrain future options
• Strong collaboration skills and the ability to influence through clarity rather than force
• Clear, direct communication style with a focus on shared understanding
• Advanced proficiency in English to effectively communicate complex information with team members and stakeholders, and to complete job-related documentation and collaboration tasks. We welcome applicants from all backgrounds and are committed to providing reasonable accommodations where applicable.

• Deep Python experience, including FastAPI, SQL Alchemy, or comparable frameworks
• Strong experience with relational databases, particularly PostgreSQL
• Track record of improving system safety through backward-compatible changes, safer migrations, and incremental rollouts

#hybrid…