Job brief: Principal Software Engineer, CDN (Starlink)

What JoRoute checked · Checked by JoRoute

• Listed on SpaceX's own job board. JoRoute does not take listings from job ads or recruiters.
• First seen by JoRoute 2026-11-13 (today); last confirmed on the board 2026-11-13.
• The apply link opens boards.greenhouse.io, the address SpaceX's board gives for this job.
• No other listing with this title and place on this board in the last 90 days.
• No layoff notices (WARN) under this name in the state files JoRoute reads.

What the listing says · Employer's own words, not checked

• Pay: $270,000 to $355,000 a year
• Job type: Not stated
• Where: Palo Alto, CA · Hawthorne, CA · Redmond, WA
• Posted: 2026-11-12

What the job asks · Employer's own words, not checked

Level: Lead / staff. The title says "Principal".

Must have

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering or other STEM discipline AND 10+ years of professional experience in software development;
• Or 12+ years of software development experience in lieu of a degree.
• 5+ years of professional distributed systems experience or experience designing, building, and/ scaling a CDN system.
• 7+ years of professional networking experience.
• Advanced degree in computer science or engineering.
• Must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed.

Conditions

• You may also accrue 3 weeks of paid vacation and will be eligible for 10 or more paid holidays per year.
• employment with SpaceX is governed on the basis of merit, competence and qualifications and will not be influenced in any manner by race, color, religion, gender, national origin/…

Main duties

• Design, build, and scale a new Content Delivery Network (CDN) for Starlink.
• Build robust, responsive, and scalable distributed systems.
• Build the necessary tools, visibility, and alerting mechanisms to effectively diagnose, operate, and maintain complex, business-critical systems in real-time.
• Design algorithms to understand and optimize hardware utilization and cost efficiency, evaluated against intuitive and business-critical performance metrics.
• Implement the systems which shape traffic across multiple CDNs.

Lines copied from the posting, not rewritten. "Preferred" or "nice to have" items are not listed as must-haves.

How it compares · Compared by JoRoute from listings

• Typical listed pay for software engineer jobs in California: $208k a year (775 listings, 40 employers). This listing is 50% higher.
• Across SpaceX's 2,855 open listings, 57% of those with a posting date were first posted more than 60 days ago. How SpaceX hires

What nobody outside the employer knows · Not known

• Whether the role is already filled or on hold: employers often leave listings up.
• How many people applied, and who reads the applications.
• Where in the published range an offer would land.

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