# Principal Engineer, Product Engineering
**Company:** [1Password](https://scaleengineer.com/companies/1password)
Principal Engineer at 1Password is a senior individual contributor role responsible for defining technical direction and architecture across core product experiences serving 180,000+ businesses. The role demands expertise in distributed systems design, microservices architectures, and enterprise-scale product development, with a specific focus on integrating AI capabilities into security-conscious applications while balancing product velocity with engineering durability, operational resilience, and cross-platform consistency.
**Role:** Principal Engineer
**Seniority:** Principal
**Locations:** Remote (United States | Canada)
**Remote:** yes
**Salary:** 228000–369000 USD
[Apply](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/1password/42e39877-8c7c-4f18-9d42-336777df1de9)
Canonical: https://scaleengineer.com/jobs/1password/principal-engineer-product-engineering-42e39877
---
## Responsibilities

- Define Organization-Level Technical Architecture: Drive architectural vision and technical direction across the entire Product Engineering organization, spanning client applications, distributed services, data platforms, and shared infrastructure to ensure scalability, maintainability, and operational excellence across all product systems.
- Establish Engineering Standards and Patterns: Create reusable architectural patterns, engineering standards, and technical guidelines that enable Product Engineering teams to build consistent, scalable, and maintainable systems while reducing duplication and operational overhead across the organization.
- Lead AI Integration Strategy: Guide the integration of AI and machine learning capabilities into customer-facing product experiences, establishing evaluation frameworks, rollout safety protocols, telemetry standards, fallback behavior guidelines, auditability requirements, and operational controls for AI-enabled systems.
- Drive Cross-Functional Alignment: Partner closely with Product, Design, Security, Privacy, Infrastructure, and Data teams to ensure technical decisions support both immediate customer outcomes and long-term operational durability, resolving conflicts between teams with different priorities and constraints.
- Shape Distributed Systems Architecture: Influence and drive key architectural decisions around distributed systems design, event-driven architectures, synchronization models, scalability, performance, reliability, extensibility, and platform interoperability to support enterprise-scale product operations.
- Establish Shared Platform Capabilities: Design and implement shared platform infrastructure and patterns that enable consistent product feature development across clients, services, APIs, and AI-assisted workflows, reducing technical friction and improving developer ergonomics.
- Raise Production Excellence Standards: Elevate the operational bar for production systems through stronger reliability practices, comprehensive observability standards, incident readiness protocols, performance analysis frameworks, and engineering discipline across all Product Engineering teams.
- Mentor and Influence Technical Leaders: Mentor and influence engineers across the organization through technical leadership, architecture reviews, design guidance, and hands-on problem solving, raising the engineering bar and fostering a culture of technical excellence and operational discipline.
- Navigate Complex Technical Tradeoffs: Help teams navigate difficult technical decisions and tradeoffs, particularly balancing product velocity with engineering durability, security and privacy requirements with performance, and immediate delivery needs with long-term platform sustainability.
- Drive Long-Term Technical Strategy: Develop and execute long-term technical strategy across critical product areas, making pragmatic architectural investments that improve engineering velocity without creating organizational drag or platform fragmentation.

## Requirements

### education

- {"name":"Computer Science or Related Field","description":"Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Mathematics, or related technical field preferred; equivalent professional experience and demonstrated mastery of computer science fundamentals can substitute."}

### technical

- {"name":"Distributed Systems Design and Operations","description":"Demonstrated experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems where reliability, scalability, maintainability, and operational excellence are critical requirements in production environments."}
- {"name":"Microservices and Event-Driven Architecture","description":"Proven expertise building or scaling microservices architectures and event-driven systems in production, with strong understanding of distributed systems constraints, synchronization models, and platform boundaries."}
- {"name":"Multi-Platform Product Systems","description":"Experience building customer-facing product systems spanning multiple client applications (web, mobile, desktop), distributed backend services, APIs, cloud infrastructure, and data platforms with cross-platform consistency requirements."}
- {"name":"Security and Privacy-First Architecture","description":"Strong instincts and demonstrated experience designing systems with privacy and security as foundational requirements, including handling of telemetry, user data, permissions models, auditability, and trust-sensitive system design patterns."}
- {"name":"AI and ML Integration in Production","description":"Practical experience integrating AI or machine learning capabilities into production applications, understanding engineering tradeoffs involved in introducing AI into customer-facing systems, and designing for observability and safety in AI-enabled workflows."}
- {"name":"Systems Thinking and Architecture","description":"Strong systems-thinking instincts with ability to reason effectively about platform boundaries, distributed systems constraints, developer ergonomics, technical debt, and long-term technical sustainability implications of architectural decisions."}
- {"name":"Cross-Team Technical Leadership","description":"Deep experience driving architecture and technical direction across multiple teams, product domains, or organizational units, with demonstrated ability to influence decisions and drive alignment across groups with different incentives and technical perspectives."}

### experience

- {"name":"Senior-Level Engineering Leadership","description":"8+ years of software engineering experience with significant time spent in senior or staff-level technical leadership roles driving architectural decisions and technical strategy across organizations or large product areas."}
- {"name":"Enterprise-Scale System Operations","description":"Hands-on experience operating systems serving enterprise customers or large user bases, understanding requirements for reliability, scalability, compliance, and operational excellence in production environments."}
- {"name":"Cross-Functional Collaboration","description":"Track record of effectively collaborating with Product, Design, Security, Infrastructure, and other technical teams, communicating complex technical tradeoffs clearly to non-technical stakeholders and executives."}
- {"name":"Technical Decision Making Under Ambiguity","description":"Demonstrated ability to operate effectively in ambiguous environments, making durable technical decisions before all variables are known, and guiding organizations through complex technical decisions."}

## Skills

### required

- {"name":"Distributed Systems Design","description":"Strong expertise in designing and building distributed systems architectures, understanding consensus algorithms, eventual consistency, fault tolerance, and scalability patterns."}
- {"name":"Cloud Infrastructure and DevOps","description":"Deep proficiency with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), containerization technologies (Docker, Kubernetes), infrastructure-as-code, and DevOps practices for production environments."}
- {"name":"Backend Systems Architecture","description":"Expert-level understanding of backend systems design, including service architecture, API design, databases, caching strategies, message queues, and system scalability patterns."}
- {"name":"Production Operations and Observability","description":"Comprehensive experience with production operations, including monitoring, logging, observability platforms, incident response, performance analysis, and reliability engineering practices."}
- {"name":"Security and Privacy Engineering","description":"Deep understanding of security principles, cryptography concepts, authentication and authorization patterns, data privacy regulations, and secure-by-design architecture principles."}
- {"name":"Technical Communication","description":"Ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly to diverse audiences including engineers, executives, and cross-functional partners, explaining tradeoffs and strategic decisions in accessible terms."}

### preferred

- {"name":"Identity and Access Management (IAM)","description":"Experience in identity, authentication, authorization, secrets management, enterprise security, or trust-oriented product domains, particularly in IAM platforms or unified access management solutions."}
- {"name":"Multi-Region and High-Scale Distributed Systems","description":"Specific experience building large-scale event-driven systems, multi-region distributed architectures, or systems handling hundreds of millions of events or requests in cloud environments."}
- {"name":"Cross-Platform Application Development","description":"Experience building cross-platform applications (iOS, Android, web, desktop) or shared platform architectures serving multiple client targets at scale with consistency requirements."}
- {"name":"Developer Platform and Infrastructure","description":"Background building developer platforms, internal engineering frameworks, CI/CD systems, or leading large-scale infrastructure modernization initiatives that improve engineering productivity."}
- {"name":"LLM and AI Integration","description":"Experience integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) or AI-assisted workflows into customer-facing SaaS applications, including designing for safety, observability, and user trust."}
- {"name":"Endpoint Security and Device Posture","description":"Experience with endpoint trust, browser security, browser extension architecture, enterprise administration workflows, device posture systems, or platform-specific security challenges."}
- {"name":"Engineering Leadership and Mentorship","description":"Proven track record mentoring and developing engineering talent, raising engineering standards across organizations through technical leadership, design reviews, and fostering operational excellence culture."}

## Tech stack

### tools

- {"name":"Kubernetes","description":"Container orchestration platform essential for managing distributed systems at scale, providing deployment automation, scaling, and operational management for cloud-native applications."}
- {"name":"Terraform","description":"Infrastructure-as-Code tool for defining, provisioning, and managing cloud infrastructure, enabling reproducible, version-controlled infrastructure deployments across environments."}
- {"name":"GitHub","description":"Version control and collaboration platform essential for managing distributed development workflows, code reviews, CI/CD integration, and engineering team collaboration."}
- {"name":"DataDog or Similar Observability Platforms","description":"Comprehensive monitoring, logging, and observability platform providing insights into distributed system performance, reliability, and operational health essential for production systems."}
- {"name":"Apache Kafka","description":"Distributed event streaming platform commonly used for building event-driven systems, real-time data pipelines, and asynchronous communication patterns in large-scale architectures."}

### others

- {"name":"AI and Machine Learning Integration","description":"Experience integrating AI capabilities into product systems, including LLM APIs, AI-assisted workflows, evaluation frameworks, and designing for safety and observability in AI-enabled applications."}
- {"name":"Enterprise Security Architecture","description":"Design and implementation of security-first systems including authentication, authorization, encryption, secrets management, compliance requirements, and audit trails for enterprise customers."}
- {"name":"Cross-Platform Consistency Patterns","description":"Architectural patterns and strategies for maintaining consistent behavior, data synchronization, and user experience across multiple client platforms (web, iOS, Android, desktop) from a distributed backend."}
- {"name":"Reliability Engineering","description":"Practices and methodologies for designing and operating reliable systems including SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, incident response, chaos engineering, and operational resilience patterns."}

### databases

- {"name":"PostgreSQL","description":"Enterprise-grade relational database widely used for transactional systems, offering ACID guarantees, advanced features, and strong reliability characteristics for critical product systems."}
- {"name":"DynamoDB","description":"AWS managed NoSQL database service providing high scalability and performance for distributed systems requiring horizontal scaling and low-latency access patterns."}
- {"name":"Redis","description":"In-memory data store used for caching, session management, real-time analytics, and building distributed system components requiring low-latency access and high throughput."}
- {"name":"Elasticsearch","description":"Search and analytics engine used for observability, log aggregation, and building search-powered features at scale in distributed product systems."}

### languages

- {"name":"Rust","description":"Systems programming language providing memory safety and high performance, increasingly popular for distributed systems and security-critical applications in modern cloud infrastructure."}
- {"name":"Go","description":"Cloud-native programming language commonly used for building distributed systems, microservices, and infrastructure tooling with excellent concurrency support and performance characteristics."}
- {"name":"TypeScript/JavaScript","description":"Essential for modern full-stack development, including web clients, Node.js backend services, and API development with strong typing support through TypeScript for large-scale applications."}
- {"name":"Python","description":"Widely used for data platforms, AI/ML integration, infrastructure automation, and data processing pipelines in modern product engineering environments."}
- {"name":"SQL","description":"Fundamental for database design, query optimization, and data platform architecture essential to modern product systems serving enterprise customers at scale."}

### frameworks

- {"name":"Microservices Architecture","description":"Architectural pattern for building distributed systems as independently deployable services, enabling scalability, resilience, and organizational alignment for large Product Engineering teams."}
- {"name":"Event-Driven Architecture","description":"Asynchronous architecture pattern using event streams and message brokers to decouple systems, enable real-time processing, and build highly scalable distributed systems across multiple domains."}
- {"name":"API-First Design","description":"Design methodology prioritizing well-designed APIs as contract layers between systems, enabling consistency across clients and services while facilitating cross-team development."}
- {"name":"Cloud-Native Architecture","description":"Architectural approach leveraging cloud services, containerization, orchestration, and managed services to build scalable, resilient, and operationally efficient systems."}

## Benefits

### benefits

## Compensation

- **max:** 369000
- **min:** 246000
- **currency:** USD
- **stockOptions:** true

## Interview process

### steps

## Full description
_**1Password is growing.** We’ve surpassed $400M in ARR and we’re continuing to accelerate, earning a spot on the Forbes Cloud 100 for four years in a row and teaming up with iconic partners like Oracle Red Bull Racing._

**About 1Password**

_At 1Password, we’re building the foundation for a safe, productive digital future. Our mission is to unleash employee productivity without compromising security by ensuring every identity is authentic, every application sign-in is secure, and every device is trusted. We innovated the market-leading enterprise password manager and pioneered Unified Access Management, a new cybersecurity category built for the way people and AI agents work today. As one of the most loved brands in cybersecurity, we take a human-centric approach in everything from product strategy to user experience. Over 180,000 businesses, from Fortune 100 leaders to the world’s most innovative AI companies, trust 1Password to help their teams securely adopt the SaaS and AI tools they need to do their best work._

_If you're excited about the opportunity to contribute to the digital safety of millions, to work alongside a team of curious, driven individuals, and to solve hard problems in a fast-paced, dynamic environment, then we want to hear from you. Come join us and help shape a safer, simpler digital future._

We are hiring a Principal Engineer to help define the technical direction for core product experiences at 1Password.  
  
This is a senior individual contributor role for an engineer who can translate ambitious product strategy into systems that scale technically and operationally. You will drive architecture, engineering standards, and technical direction across the product ecosystem, working across client applications, distributed services, data platforms, and shared infrastructure to build experiences that are secure, reliable, performant, and maintainable.This is not a role scoped to a single team or subsystem. The expectation is organization-level technical leadership: shaping how Product Engineering approaches complex cross-cutting problems, guiding long-term architectural investments, and establishing the technical patterns and operational standards other teams build against.  
  
You will operate across the full lifecycle of product engineering work, from architecture and system design through production operations and long-term evolution. Success in this role requires balancing product velocity with engineering durability, making pragmatic technical tradeoffs, and driving alignment across teams with different priorities and constraints.  
  
You will help evolve the next generation of 1Password’s product architecture, including the responsible integration of AI capabilities into core product experiences. Security and privacy by default, cross-platform consistency, operational resilience, and enterprise-scale reliability are foundational requirements that must be reflected in every architectural decision.  
  
If you want to build systems used daily by millions of individuals and hundreds of thousands of businesses, and solve engineering problems where distributed systems, reliability, usability, security, and intelligent automation all matter simultaneously, this is that role.

  
**How we’re using AI today**

Our Engineering, Product, and Design teams are thoughtfully integrating AI across the full software and product development lifecycle to move faster without sacrificing quality or security. In practice, that looks like engineers using AI-assisted coding tools to accelerate reviews and catch bugs earlier, product managers synthesizing user research at scale, and designers rapidly prototyping and iterating with AI-generated mockups. We approach AI the same way we approach security: with clear principles, human accountability at every consequential decision point, and rigorous evaluation before anything ships to customers.  

This is a remote opportunity within Canada and the US.

**What we're looking for:**

* You have designed and operated large-scale distributed systems where reliability, scalability, maintainability, and operational excellence matter.
* You have deep experience driving architecture and technical direction across multiple teams, organizations, or product domains.
* You have strong systems-thinking instincts and can reason effectively about platform boundaries, distributed systems constraints, developer ergonomics, and long-term technical sustainability.
* You have experience building customer-facing product systems across clients, APIs, distributed services, cloud infrastructure, and data platforms.
* You have experience building or scaling event-driven systems, microservices architectures, or shared platform infrastructure in production environments.
* You have practical experience integrating AI or ML capabilities into production applications and understand the engineering tradeoffs involved in introducing AI into trust-sensitive product experiences.
* You have strong instincts for privacy-preserving and security-conscious system design, including thoughtful handling of telemetry, user data, permissions, and auditability.
* You are effective at driving alignment across teams with different incentives, priorities, and technical perspectives.
* You communicate clearly with engineers, executives, and cross-functional partners, and can explain complex technical tradeoffs in practical terms.
* You are comfortable operating in ambiguity and helping organizations make durable technical decisions before every variable is known.

**Bonus points for:**

* Experience in identity, authentication, authorization, secrets management, enterprise security, or trust-oriented product domains.
* Experience building large-scale event-driven or multi-region distributed systems in cloud environments.
* Experience building cross-platform applications or shared platform architectures at scale.
* Experience with developer platforms, internal engineering frameworks, CI/CD systems, or large-scale infrastructure modernization initiatives.
* Experience integrating LLMs or AI-assisted workflows into customer-facing SaaS applications.
* Experience with endpoint trust, browser or extension security, enterprise administration workflows, or device posture systems.
* Experience mentoring engineers and raising the engineering bar across organizations through technical leadership and operational excellence.

**What you can expect:**

* Define architecture and technical direction for core product capabilities spanning clients, distributed services, data platforms, and shared infrastructure.
* Establish engineering standards and reusable architectural patterns for scalable, maintainable, and resilient product systems across Product Engineering.
* Drive long-term technical strategy across critical product areas, balancing immediate delivery needs with scalability, operational excellence, and platform sustainability.
* Partner closely with Product, Design, Security, Privacy, Infrastructure, and Data teams to ensure technical decisions support both customer outcomes and long-term operational durability.
* Guide how AI-powered capabilities are integrated into customer-facing product experiences, ensuring systems are reliable, observable, operationally safe, and aligned with customer trust expectations.
* Define engineering expectations for AI-enabled product systems, including evaluation frameworks, rollout safety, telemetry, fallback behavior, auditability, and operational controls.
* Establish shared platform capabilities and infrastructure patterns that allow teams to build product features consistently across clients, services, APIs, and AI-assisted workflows.
* Influence and drive key architectural decisions around distributed systems design, event-driven architectures, synchronization models, scalability, performance, reliability, extensibility, and platform interoperability.
* Help teams navigate difficult technical tradeoffs, unblock large cross-functional initiatives, and reduce systemic engineering complexity across the organization.
* Raise the operational bar for production systems through stronger reliability practices, observability standards, incident readiness, performance analysis, and engineering discipline.
* Mentor and influence engineers across the organization through technical leadership, architecture reviews, design guidance, and hands-on problem solving.
  
  
**What success looks like:**  
Success in this role means Product Engineering can scale product development without sacrificing reliability, maintainability, security, or customer trust. That includes:

* Durable architectural patterns that enable teams to move faster with less duplication and lower operational overhead.
* Product systems that scale reliably across platforms, enterprise environments, and growing customer complexity.
* Engineering teams making more consistent technical decisions with clearer standards and stronger shared foundations.
* AI-powered product experiences that are useful, measurable, trustworthy, and operationally safe.
* Reduced systemic friction across development, delivery, observability, and cross-team coordination.
* Stronger operational resilience, including improved reliability, debuggability, rollout safety, and incident response readiness.
* Technical investments that improve long-term engineering velocity instead of creating organizational drag or platform fragmentation.

USA-based roles only: The annual base salary for this role is between $246,000 USD and $369,000 USD, plus immediate participation in 1Password's benefits program (health, dental, 401k and many others), utilization of our generous paid time off, an equity grant and, where applicable, participation in our incentive programs.

Canada-based roles only: The annual base salary for this role is between $228,000 CAD and $342,000 CAD, plus immediate participation in 1Password’s generous benefits program (health, dental, RRSP and many others), utilization of our generous paid time off, an equity grant and, where applicable, participation in our incentive programs.
  
  
At 1Password, we approach each individual's compensation with a promise of fair market value and internal equity commensurate with experience and specific skill set.  
  
_This posting is for an existing vacancy._  

  
**Our culture**   
At 1Password, we prioritize collaboration, clear and transparent communication, receptiveness to feedback, and alignment with our core values: keep it simple, lead with honesty, and put people first.   
  
You’ll be part of a team that challenges the status quo, and is excited to experiment and iterate in search of the best solution. That said, [_1Password is not for everyone_](https://blog.1password.com/inside-the-culture-powering-1passwords-next-chapter/). Our work is demanding, we strive for excellence, and the pace is fast. We need people who are keen to take on challenging problems, who seek feedback to grow, and who are driven to make an impact. If you're looking for a place where you can settle into a comfortable routine, this might not be the right fit for you. We’re looking for individuals who are proven experts in their fields, as well as those who are highly adaptable, can thrive in ambiguity and through change, are curious, and above all deliver results.   
  
**How we work with AI**  
We are committed to leveraging cutting-edge technology—including AI—to achieve our mission. We also understand that thinking critically about AI in its current forms will help us create better solutions for our customers and ourselves with its future forms, which will help us continue to close the gap between security and privacy and achieve our mission. We want team members at all levels to take the approach of actively learning AI best practices, identifying opportunities to apply AI in meaningful ways, and driving innovative solutions in their daily work. Embracing the future of AI isn't just encouraged—it's an essential part of how we will be successful at 1Password.

This approach extends to our hiring process—candidates are welcome to use AI tools responsibly and thoughtfully during the application process.  
  
**Our approach to remote work**   
We believe in the power of remote work, but recognize that in-person connection is important to help us achieve our mission. While we are a remote-first company, travel for in-person engagement is a part of almost all roles, and we require our employees to be ready and willing to take part. Frequency will depend on role and responsibilities, and may include, but is not limited to: annual department-wide offsites, team meetings, and customer/industry events.  
  
**What we offer**  
We believe in working hard, and rewarding that hard work through our benefits. While not an exhaustive list, here is a glance at what we currently offer:   
  
_Health and wellbeing_  
👶 Maternity and parental leave top-up programs  
🩺 Competitive health benefits  
🏝 Generous PTO policy   
  
 _Growth and future_   
📈 RSU program for most employees  
💸 Retirement matching program  
🔑 Free 1Password account  
  
_Community_   
🤝 Paid volunteer days   
🏆 Peer-to-peer recognition through Bonusly  
🌎 Remote-first work environment  
_\*Some roles in our GTM team are currently being hired for in-person hybrid work in Toronto and Austin. These roles will specify on the posting._

**You belong here.**

_1Password is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to fostering an inclusive, diverse and equitable workplace that is built on trust, support and respect. We welcome all individuals and do not discriminate on the basis of gender identity and expression, race, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, colour, religion, creed, gender, national origin, age, marital status, pregnancy, sex, citizenship, education, languages spoken or veteran status. Be yourself, find your people and share the things you love._

_Accommodation is available upon request at any point during our recruitment process. If you require an accommodation, please speak to your talent acquisition partner or email us at nextbit@agilebits.com and we’ll work to meet your needs._

_Remote work is a part of our DNA. Given that our company was founded remotely in 2005, we can safely say we're experts at building remote culture. That said, remote work at 1Password does mean working from your home country. If you've got questions or concerns about this, your talent partner would be happy to address them with you._

_Successful applicants will be required to complete a background check that may consist of prior employment verification, reference checks, education confirmation, criminal background, publicly available social media, credit history, or other information, as permitted by local law._

_1Password uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies, including natural language processing and predictive analytics, to assist in the initial screening of employment applications and improve our recruitment process. See_ [_here_](https://www.ashbyhq.com/downloadables/ashby-bias-audit-08-2024.pdf) _for the latest third party bias audit information. If you prefer not to have your application assessed using AI/ML features, you may opt out by completing_ [_this form_](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/1password/automation-notice)_. For additional information see our_ [_Candidate Privacy Notice_](https://1password.com/files/candidate-privacy-notice.pdf)_._