Principal Engineer
Software Engineering
Illinois, USA
USD 210k-314k / year + Equity
Posting Type
Remote/Hybrid
Job Overview
ABOUT THE ROLEWe’re seeking a seasoned technical leader with deep expertise in building and scaling complex, cloud-native distributed systems. This individual is a recognized authority in architecture, with a proven track record of shaping organization-wide technical standards, driving security and reliability strategies, and influencing senior stakeholders. You’ll bring strong experience in high-throughput data systems, event-driven architectures, and modern orchestration frameworks, along with the ability to align technical vision to broader business strategy. Beyond technical excellence, you’re a strategic thinker and mentor who elevates teams, champions best practices—including emerging AI-assisted development—and thrives in high-impact, highly collaborative environments.
Job Description and Requirements
Who We Are
Relativity is a leading legal data intelligence company building technology that helps users organize data, discover the truth, and act on it with confidence. Our AI‑powered, cloud platform, RelativityOne, transforms massive volumes of complex information into actionable insights for litigation, investigations, regulatory inquiries, data breach responses, and other high‑stakes legal work where accuracy and trust are crucial.
The world’s largest law firms, corporations and government agencies rely on Relativity’s legal AI software to securely surface and manage the most relevant and impactful information in their matters. Beyond our commercial impact, we’re deeply committed to expanding access to technology for academic institutions through Relativity Academic and supporting pro bono legal work through Justice for Change.
What We Do
At Relativity, engineers don’t just write code— they harness AI tools to architect, optimize, and deliver scalable software faster and shape the future of legal technology. They shape how industries uncover critical insights, ensure compliance, advance access to justice and continuously evolve our platform using the latest technologies, including cloud-native architectures, AI capabilities, and modern developer tooling. Our AI powers privacy programs, identifies confidential information, and detects language indicating misconduct. We’re reimagining how legal professionals uncover truth at scale, and engineering is at the heart of that transformation.
What You’ll Do
Drive the design and architecture of distributed, scalable, secure full-stack cloud services that process petabytes of data weekly. Influence execution across engineering.
Resolve the most complex, cross-organizational technical problems through deep technical expertise, collaboration, and hands-on implementation.
Define and lead the organization-wide technical vision and architecture and shape long-term platform and data strategy.
Establish enterprise standards for system scalability, reliability, maintainability, security, testability, and flexibility, partnering with teams to drive adoption.
Influence and align engineering execution with company-level strategy and shape engineering culture across the organization.
Influence executive-level product and platform decisions.
Lead the evolution of Enrichment from primarily batch-oriented pipelines toward streaming-first, continuously processing workflows that deliver real-time and large-scale results (1K to 1B+ files) — and write the code that proves the patterns out.
Stay deeply hands-on. Principals at Relativity aren’t ivory-tower architects — they design, implement, review, and operate production software. You’ll be in the codebase, in the metrics, and on call for the hardest problems, owning systems end to end.
Drive our agentic engineering push within Enrichment. Establish best practices, guardrails, and tooling for AI-assisted and agentic development, and raise the bar for how the domain designs, tests, and ships software in an AI-driven world.
What We’re Looking For
Required
12+ years of experience designing, building and operating complex cloud-native distributed systems.
Recognized authority in architecture and distributed systems.
Experience defining organization-wide technical standards.
Deep involvement in security, compliance, and reliability strategy.
Ability to align technical vision with company-level strategy.
Proven influence at senior and executive levels.
Exceptional mentorship, communication, and strategic thinking skills.
Deep expertise in high-throughput data processing and transformation at scale — large batch pipelines, streaming/continuous systems, or both.
Experience with durable workflow/orchestration engines (e.g., Temporal), event-driven architectures, and container-based compute (e.g., Kubernetes).
Strong grounding in reliability, performance, security, and observability for systems running under strict SLOs.
Preferred
Experience guiding enterprise UI/UX, system or data architecture.
Background in legal tech, AI-enabled platforms, or regulated domains.
External thought leadership or industry contribution.
Familiarity with AI-development tools like GitHub Copilot, Cursor or Claude Code.
Hands-on experience designing or scaling streaming / continuous data-processing systems (e.g., Event Hub, Kafka, Apache Spark, or similar stream-processing frameworks).
Demonstrated leadership in adopting agentic and AI-assisted engineering workflows (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or Claude Code) and establishing team best practices and guardrails.
Why We Could Be A Great Fit
Impactful Mission: Organize Data, Discover the Truth and Act on It - Our customers include Fortune 500 enterprises and leading law firms managing high-stakes matters on our platform.
Growth Path: Engineers gain exposure across the stack, from distributed systems to AI-enabled workflows, accelerating career growth.
Engineering Culture: Continuous delivery, strong observability, and end-to-end ownership.
Inclusive Environment: Diverse backgrounds and perspectives make us stronger.
Community Impact: Volunteer opportunities and company-sponsored charitable programs.
Compensation & Benefits: Competitive salary, health and retirement programs, wellness resources, discretionary time off (DTO), parental leave for primary and secondary caregivers, two annual company breaks, home office stipend, and an equity program.
Relativity is committed to competitive, fair, and equitable compensation practices.
This position is eligible for total compensation which includes a competitive base salary, an annual performance bonus, and long-term incentives.
The expected salary range for this role is between following values:
$210,000 and $314,000The final offered salary will be based on several factors, including but not limited to the candidate's depth of experience, skill set, qualifications, and internal pay equity. Hiring at the top end of the range would not be typical, to allow for future meaningful salary growth in this position.
Required Skills:
Agile Methodology, Algorithms, Automation, Big Data Processing, Distributed Systems, Mentorship, Problem Solving, Software Architectures, Strategic Planning, System Designs, Technical Leadership