Principal Engineer, Backend

Have you ever had that green-light feeling? When you hit every green light and the day just feels like magic. CLEAR's mission is to create frictionless experiences where every day has that feeling. With more than 30+ million passionate members and hundreds of partners around the world, CLEAR’s identity platform is transforming the way people live, work, and travel. Whether it’s at the airport, stadium, or right on your phone, CLEAR connects you to the things that make you, you - unlocking easier, more secure, and more seamless experiences - making them all feel like magic. 

We're seeking a Principal Engineer specializing in backend distributed systems at scale for our Aviation and Travel teams. You will play a critical role in selecting and implementing technology, ensuring our systems excel in performance and reliability. Collaborating cross-functionally, you'll provide leadership and guidance to engineering teams, nurturing their growth and enhancing their capabilities. Additionally, you'll be a crucial partner to various teams across CLEAR, including Product Management, Security, Operations, and more. If you're passionate about shaping distributed systems and optimizing the customer journey across all member touchpoints, including product launches designed to enhance the seamless member experience from home to gate, while driving engineering and operational excellence, we invite you to join us in revolutionizing our platform.

What you'll do:

• Identify and build support for technical initiatives that address CLEAR’s most important needs
• Define the 3-5 year technical vision and strategy 
• Solve CLEAR’s thorniest, most intractable technical problems
• Support the growth and success of both engineers and non-engineers across CLEAR
• Evaluate new software components and practices and influence teams to use them
• Review and craft architecture documents, working with engineering teams to make the right decisions from design through implementation
• Be both hands-on and strategic

What you’re great at: 

• 10+ years of professional software development experience, focusing on building cloud-based distributed systems written in Java or related languages
• Expert in contributing to the architecture and design (architecture, design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and current systems
• Deep expertise in observability and reliability patterns
• Experienced with RDBMS, NoSQL, caching solutions, and real-time streaming data stores
• Partners well with business and other stakeholders and collaborates effectively with peers
• Excellent communication skills, able to explain technical topics to non-technical audiences, manages up, down, and across

How You’ll be Rewarded:

At CLEAR, we help YOU move forward - because when you’re at your best, we’re at our best. You’ll work with talented team members motivated by our mission of making experiences safer and easier. Our offices are bright and energetic with an open concept and plenty of conference rooms and casual co-working spaces. We also offer catered lunches every day and have fully stocked kitchens. Outside of the office, we invest in your well-being and learning & development with stipends and reimbursement programs.

We offer holistic total rewards, including comprehensive healthcare plans, family-building benefits (fertility and adoption/surrogacy support), flexible time off, annual wellness stipend, free OneMedical memberships for you and your dependents, a CLEAR Plus membership, and a 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.The base salary range for this role is $230,000-$270,000, depending on levels of skills and experience.

The base salary range represents the low and high end of CLEAR’s salary range for this position. Salaries will vary depending on various factors which include, but are not limited to location, education, skills, experience and performance. The range listed is just one component of CLEAR’s total compensation package for employees and other rewards may include annual bonuses, commission, Restricted Stock Units

CLEAR provides reasonable accommodation to qualified individuals with disabilities or protected needs. Please let us know if you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job or perform your job. Examples of reasonable accommodation include, but are not limited to, time off, extra breaks, making a change to the application process or work procedures, policy exceptions, providing documents in an alternative format, live captioning or using a sign language interpreter, or using specialized equipment.

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