Location: Berlin, DE

About Tower

Tower helps data scientists and data engineers deliver on their roadmaps faster by providing a serverless data and AI platform built on Iceberg storage that is fully-integrated with your enterprise infrastructure. Our mission is to support the development of a multi-engine world where companies pick the best engine for the job and companies own their data. We are a team of industry veterans, backed by leading VCs, on a mission to push the boundaries of what’s possible in an effort to dramatically improve the lives of data engineers and data scientists around the world.

Role overview

We’re looking for a Principal Software Engineer to help define and execute the technical strategy of Tower. In this role, you'll work directly with our CTO to shape the architectural foundation of the platform, drive cross-cutting technical initiatives, and mentor engineers across the team. You’ll help us make the hardest technical decisions—balancing performance, scalability, developer experience, and time-to-market as we scale our infrastructure and product offerings.

This is a high-impact, high-trust role for someone who thrives on solving deep technical challenges and has a strong point of view on building robust, elegant systems that last. You’ll have broad influence across the company and play a key role in ensuring that Tower’s technology scales with our ambitions.

What you’ll do

• Collaborate closely with the CTO to define and evolve the overall technical strategy for Tower’s compute and control plane.
• Drive architectural decisions across major product surfaces—including runtime infrastructure, orchestration systems, developer tools, and the data plane.
• As this is a coding-focused role, lead by example in coding and setting the standard for engineering excellence across the team.
• Identify technical risks and design for change—building systems that scale with both customer demand and company growth.
• Guide and mentor engineers across the whole stack, helping them grow and raising the technical bar company-wide.
• Partner with product, design, and engineering leadership to ensure alignment between roadmap goals and technical strategy.

What we’re looking for

• Significant proven experience in software engineering, with a track record of owning complex system design and driving architecture across teams.
• Deep expertise in building distributed systems and infrastructure, particularly for data-intensive or cloud-native applications.
• Proficiency in multiple programming languages across multiple paradigms. We typically work in Golang, Rust, TypeScript, and Python.
• Industry-leading expertise working on cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and containerization technologies (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Strategic mindset, meaning you’re comfortable thinking several steps ahead and designing systems that adapt over time.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to translate technical complexity into clear, actionable decisions.