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Principal Software Engineer (SRE)-Onshape
Hybrid-Boston, MA
About the Role
Onshape’s Site Reliability Engineering team is looking for a Principal Software Engineer to play a critical role in ensuring the long‑term reliability, scalability, and operational excellence of our platform.
As a Principal Software Engineer, you will operate with a high degree of autonomy and influence. You will lead complex, cross‑organization reliability initiatives, shape reliability strategy, and serve as a technical authority and trusted advisor across engineering.
Your work will directly shape the experience of our customers by ensuring the platform is fast, resilient, and dependable. As a Principal Software Engineer, you will help protect customer trust by driving reliability across the entire system lifecycle.
This role is ideal for engineers who enjoy solving ambiguous, high‑impact problems at scale, influencing system design across teams, and raising the reliability bar for an entire organization.
What You’ll Do
Own Reliability at Scale
- Lead design, implementation, and evolution of reliability, availability, and resiliency strategies for large‑scale distributed systems written primarily in Java
- Apply deep experience operating complex, distributed systems to guide architectural decisions, reliability strategies, and long‑term system evolution
- Identify systemic risks in application architecture, data flows, and infrastructure, and drive architectural improvements that measurably improve availability, performance, and scalability
- Set and evolve reliability standards, best practices, and operational principles across R&D
Drive Operational Excellence
- Lead efforts to prevent, detect, and mitigate incidents through technical improvements and operational maturity
- Serve as a senior coordination point during major incidents, helping manage response and guide long‑term remediation
- Champion blameless post-incident reviews and ensure learnings translate into durable system improvements
Reduce Toil Through Engineering
- Apply advanced software engineering practices to eliminate manual work, reduce operational load, and improve system observability
- Design and build internal platforms, automation, and tooling that support Java‑based services and their operational needs
- Raise the bar on monitoring, alerting, and SLO/SLI adoption across systems
Lead Through Influence and Collaboration
- Partner deeply with product engineers, architects, and engineering leadership to ensure reliability and operability are first‑class concerns in system design
- Review and influence designs for complex systems involving technologies such as datastores, messaging systems, and coordination services
- Serve as a technical mentor and coach for SREs and other engineers, raising overall engineering and operational maturity
Shape Strategy and Direction
- Contribute to longer‑term reliability and infrastructure strategy aligned with business growth
- Stay current with industry trends in SRE, distributed systems, and the Java ecosystem, turning insights into practical improvements
- Help define what “great reliability” looks like for the organization and how we measure it
What We’re Looking For
Required Experience & Expertise
- US Citizenship or Permanent Residents only due to ITAR requirements.
- Ability to work hybrid from the Boston office. And be available for on-call rotation once every 10 weeks.
- 10+ years of experience in software engineering, site reliability engineering, or systems engineering roles
- Extremely strong proficiency with the Java programming language and its ecosystem, including building, debugging, and operating production Java services
- Deep experience operating complex, distributed systems in production environments
- Strong software engineering background, with a track record of delivering high‑quality, maintainable code
Technical Strength
- Expert understanding of incident management, service reliability, and performance engineering
- Strong hands‑on experience with observability (metrics, logs, traces), capacity planning, and SLO‑driven reliability
- Deep familiarity with modern cloud‑based infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure‑as‑code practices
- Ability to reason about failure modes across application, data, and infrastructure layers
Leadership & Influence
- Demonstrated ability to lead complex initiatives that span teams and organizational boundaries
- Comfortable making high‑impact technical decisions in ambiguous environments
- Strong communicator who can influence design and operational decisions across a wide range of stakeholders
Mindset
- Systems thinker focused on root‑cause analysis and durable fixes
- Calm and effective under pressure, especially during high‑severity incidents
- Curious, data‑driven, and committed to continuous improvement
Nice to Have
- Experience operating or supporting systems using technologies such as MongoDB, ZooKeeper, and RabbitMQ
- Background in performance tuning and scalability optimization of Java services
- Experience setting or influencing engineering standards at the organization level
- Prior involvement in evolving SRE or platform practices in a growing engineering organization
- Experience designing, operating, or scaling systems in cloud environments such as AWS (preferred), including familiarity with core services, networking models, and reliability features
Why This Role Matters
The Principal Software Engineer role is critical to ensuring our platform continues to meet the reliability expectations of our customers as we grow. Your work will have a broad and lasting impact—not only on individual systems, but on how reliability and operational excellence are approached across engineering.
PTC carefully considers a wide variety of factors when determining compensation. The anticipated annual salary range for this position is between $131,000 - 200,000. The salary range reflects a good-faith estimate of compensation at the time of posting. Actual compensation may vary based on a candidate's skills, qualifications, experience, and location. Additionally, candidates may be eligible for a performance-based bonus. Employees also have the opportunity to become a PTC shareholder through our employee share purchase program (ESPP), which allows for the purchase of discounted PTC stock. Certain roles may also be eligible for participation in our equity programs. Employees may be eligible for medical, dental and vision insurance, paid time off and sick leave, tuition reimbursement, 401(k) contributions and employer match, flexible spending accounts, life insurance, disability coverage and, if you are an office-assigned employee, a generous commuter subsidy. All total rewards and benefits programs are
subject to applicable plan eligibility and other terms and conditions.
For more information about PTC’s comprehensive benefits, please visit our Careers Page.
Applications will be accepted on an on-going basis.
This position is not eligible for employment-based immigration sponsorship. Applicants must be authorized to work in the United States without requiring current or future sponsorship from PTC.
At PTC, we believe in the power of diverse ideas and perspectives. As a global company that values and respects all identities, cultures, and perspectives, we strive to create an inclusive PTC for ALL through an environment where everyone feels like they belong and are empowered to bring their true, authentic selves to work. Proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer, we welcome applicants from all backgrounds and hire without regard to race, national origin, religion, age, color, ethnicity, ancestry, marital status, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, genetic information, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by local, state, or federal laws, rules, or regulations. It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.
For more information about PTC’s comprehensive benefits and our AI usage, please visit our Careers Page (https://www.ptc.com/en/careers/united-states-careers). Applications will be accepted on an on-going basis until the opportunity is filled.
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If you share our passion for problem-solving through innovation, you’ll likely become just as passionate about the PTC experience as we are. Are you ready to explore your next career move with us?
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