CTO

Lentra is hiring a Principal Engineer to work directly with the CTO on its most complex engineering, infrastructure, security, and architecture challenges. This is a hands-on individual contributor role focused on solving ambiguous, cross-functional problems, building rapid prototypes, improving engineering productivity through AI, and strengthening platform reliability and security. The role requires strong technical judgment, broad expertise across multiple technologies, and the ability to drive solutions from problem identification to production implementation.

Responsibilities:

• Complex Problem Solving: Investigate and resolve critical production issues involving performance, data integrity, scalability, and system reliability.
• Architecture and Engineering: Review and improve system architecture, multi-tenancy, API security, session management, and database performance.
• Rapid Prototyping: Build proofs-of-concept for new platforms, security solutions, internal tools, and AI-powered workflows.
• Infrastructure and Reliability: Troubleshoot and optimise Kubernetes, AWS EKS, Docker Swarm, Linux systems, and containerised applications.
• Security and Compliance: Address security vulnerabilities, conduct threat modelling, and implement controls aligned with RBI guidelines, SOC 2, and ISO 27001 requirements.
• AI Engineering Productivity: Drive the adoption of agentic coding tools, LLM-powered code reviews, and self-hosted AI models, measuring their impact on engineering productivity and quality.
• Technical Evaluation: Conduct build-vs-buy assessments and evaluate vendors, open-source tools, databases, observability platforms, and AI technologies.
• Technical Leadership: Work closely with the CTO and engineering teams, lead critical technical discussions, and represent engineering in client security reviews and incident response.
• Technical Documentation: Write architecture proposals, design documents, decision memos, and postmortems.

Requirements:

• 8+ years of experience building and operating production-grade software systems, with expertise expected at Principal Engineer level.
• Strong hands-on programming experience in at least four of the following: PHP (Laravel), TypeScript, Python, Go, Rust, and Lua.
• Deep understanding of Linux internals, troubleshooting, networking, and containerization.
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes (AWS EKS), Docker Swarm, HAProxy/OpenResty, and infrastructure monitoring tools.
• Advanced PostgreSQL knowledge, including replication, connection pooling, query performance, locking, and high-availability configurations.
• Strong application security knowledge, including OWASP, mTLS, token security, IDOR/BOLA, and key management.
• Understanding of security and compliance requirements in regulated environments, including RBI and SOC 2.
• Daily hands-on experience with AI-assisted and agentic coding tools, with the ability to evaluate their limitations and improve engineering workflows.
• Excellent technical communication, documentation, debugging, and problem-solving skills.
• Ability to independently drive ambiguous, high-impact engineering problems from investigation to resolution.

Good to Have:

• Experience in BFSI, fintech, lending platforms, credit underwriting, payments, or core banking integrations.
• Experience with self-hosted GitLab CI/CD, software supply-chain security, SBOMs, and vulnerability management.
• Experience deploying and operating self-hosted LLMs or building production AI evaluation frameworks.
• Contributions to relevant open-source projects.