Principal Backend Engineer

What You’ll Do

-Architect and scale backend services that support large-scale data ingestion, transformation, workflow orchestration, and secure delivery pipelines.

-Lead system design and technical road mapping across projects, ensuring platforms are resilient, extensible, and aligned with long-term goals.

-Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, leading by example in code quality, documentation, and system thinking.

-Own backend performance and reliability, introducing metrics-driven approaches to scale systems efficiently and reduce operational overhead.

-Collaborate across disciplines, AI researchers, frontend, data, DevOps, and product teams to design APIs and services with clear boundaries and SLAs.

-Champion platform evolution**, identifying and driving initiatives around observability, developer tooling, scalability, and security.

-Influence technical direction across engineering by leading design reviews, promoting best practices, and contributing to internal engineering standards.

Minimum Qualifications

- 7+ years of professional experience in backend software engineering, with at least 1+ years operating at a staff level or equivalent.

- Proven experience designing and scaling backend systems in production with a strong grasp of distributed systems, microservices, and service-oriented architecture.

- Advanced proficiency in one or more backend languages such as Go, Java, and Python.

- Good understanding of cloud-native architectures (AWS, GCP, or Azure), containerization (Docker), and orchestration (Kubernetes).

- Deep knowledge of data modeling, API design (REST/GraphQL/RPC), caching, SDKs, developer tooling, and asynchronous systems (queues, event buses).

- Strong understanding of servers, database metrics, and observability.

- Experience implementing secure, observable, and testable systems.

- Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, and deployment tooling (GitHub workflows, CircleCI, etc.).

- Excellent communication and collaboration skills;
able to drive alignmentacross teams.

Preferred Qualifications

- Experience working on data-intensive SaaS platforms, scalable backend services, or high-throughput data processing systems.

- Familiarity with event-driven and domain-driven design.

- Deep understanding of data structures, algorithms, system design, and architectural patterns.

- Background in leading technical initiatives across multiple teams and contributing to org-level architecture.

- Strong bias for action and ownership;
comfortable making architectural decisions with long-term impact.

- Experience in mentoring up to SDE 3 engineers and participating in technical hiring loops.

What You’ll Love / Benefits

- Opportunity to build backend systems that are foundational to the future of AI/ Gen AI.

- High agency environment where your technical leadership directly shapes product outcomes.

- Hybrid flexibility with a culture of deep ownership and collaboration.

- Work accessories and a great work location

- Competitive compensation, medical coverage (self & family), and surprise performance perks.

- Fun team culture with regular hackathons, offsites, and creative engineering challenges.