Principal/staff Software Engineer

Synthesia Synthesia · Multimodal · Seattle, WA · Engineering

Principal/Staff Software Engineer for Synthesia, a leading AI video platform. The role focuses on core enterprise platform systems, APIs for Avatar technology, and ensuring security, reliability, and scalability for large customers. The engineer will own projects, contribute to product discussions, and translate business/regulatory requirements into technical solutions, while considering long-term platform direction and evolving regulatory needs. Experience with building and operating systems at scale, system design, and production ownership (observability, incident response, reliability) is required.

What you'd actually do

  1. Work on core enterprise platform systems, focusing on services that ensure Synthesia is secure, reliable, and scalable for our largest customers.
  2. Contribute to our new suite of APIs that will unlock our market leading Avatar technology to be utilised by external creative tools.
  3. Have ownership of projects that span months and multiple teams, requiring you to break down complex, ambiguous problems into clear steps that can be delivered and validated iteratively.
  4. Evaluate your work through system health and reliability metrics, leveraging observability and monitoring to ensure systems meet performance, reliability, and compliance expectations.
  5. Consider the long-term direction of the platform, ensuring that the systems we build today can support future scale, enterprise requirements, and evolving regulatory needs.

Skills

Required

  • 7+ years of experience as a software engineer
  • Experience operating at a senior or staff level
  • Experience building and operating systems at scale
  • Strong expertise in development and system design
  • Experience across the stack (Python, React, AWS)
  • Experience owning systems in production
  • Observability
  • Incident response
  • Reliability improvements
  • Ability to work across teams and functions
  • Aligning with stakeholders
  • Driving technical initiatives end-to-end
  • Building reliable, scalable systems

Nice to have

  • Experience within platform or enterprise-focused teams
  • Previous experience leading projects or mentoring other engineers

What the JD emphasized

  • enterprise-grade systems
  • evolving regulatory needs
  • security
  • compliance
  • reliability
  • scalable

Other signals

  • AI video platform
  • API for Avatar technology
  • enterprise-grade systems
  • scalable technical solutions
  • AI Safety, Ethics and Security