Principal Engineer — Horizontal (Product & Platform)

Position: Principal Engineer — Horizontal (Product & Platform)

Experience: 10+ years

Location: Pune (Hybrid)

Industry: High-growth SaaS / Product Engineering — US Behavioral Health

Role This is a true horizontal Principal role.

You will own architecture across product and platform, stay deeply hands-on (40–60% in the code), build foundational capabilities that every product team consumes (integrations, AI, infra, data), and act as a force multiplier across teams, leads, and managers. You'll partner directly with the Director of Platform Engineering, Director of Product Engineering, Heads of Product, and the leadership team. Key Responsibilities:

 Own end-to-end architecture across Product and Platform Engineering — APIs, services, data, integrations, AI, infra. Drive coherence so independent teams ship into one well-formed system, not nine local optima.  Stay deeply hands-on (40–60% in the code). Lead by building — prototypes, reference implementations, hardest modules, performance fixes, and the first cut of every new platform capability.  Set technical standards and tech radar — coding standards, API design, data contracts, security baselines, observability, AI-engineering practices, build/release standards. Write the docs and the example code.

 Build the platform that product teams stand on — shared services, integration framework, AI agent infrastructure, data layer, internal developer experience. Treat product teams as your customers.  Help the AI team shape the AI-native roadmap— design how LLMs, agents, and AI capabilities are embedded into the product safely and scalably (prompting, retrieval, evals, guardrails, cost/latency tradeoffs).

 Own scalability, reliability, and cost of the platform on Azure — capacity planning, SLOs, incident reduction, infra cost-to-serve. Push us toward a measurable, predictable production. posture.

 Lead architecture reviews and design partnerships for every significant initiative across Product and Platform. Unblock teams, surface trade-offs early, kill premature complexity, and protect long-term tech health.  Multiply senior talent — actively coach Tech Leads, Architects, and Senior Engineers across both orgs. Run design clinics, code review forums, and tech deep-dives. Build the bench beneath you.

 Own the hardest production problems — performance regressions, multi-tenant data issues, integration failures, AI behavior issues. Lead the postmortem, ship the fix, and harden the system.  Be the technical voice with customers and partners — represent engineering in enterprise architecture reviews, security questionnaires, partner integrations, and pre-sales when needed.

 Drive the build vs buy vs partner decisions across infra, AI, and integration tooling —with clear cost, risk, and strategic rationale.  Partner with Directors and EMs on org and execution health — staffing shape, team boundaries, hiring bar, technical KPIs, and quarterly engineering bets.

Core Requirements:

• Strong experience in SaaS architecture and multi-tenant systems
• Deep expertise in .NET/C#, SQL Server
• Cloud expertise (AWS/Azure, Kubernetes, IaC)
• Hands-on AI/LLM systems (RAG, agents, guardrails)
• Strong system design, data, and integration experience
• Proven leadership and cross-team influence

Nice to Have:

• Healthcare domain (US behavioral health, HIPAA)
• Platform engineering or large-scale modernization experience