Principal Engineer

We're looking for a Principal Engineer to own the architecture and technical direction of our core platform. You'll operate at the intersection of high-scale distributed systems and fintech-grade security and compliance, turning fast-growing but increasingly complex product surfaces into resilient, extensible platforms. This is a hands-on technical leadership role: you will design and review critical systems, set engineering standards across teams, and mentor senior engineers, while staying close enough to the code to unblock the hardest problems yourself.

Responsibilities:

• Own end-to-end architecture for high-concurrency, high-availability platform services, from design through production operability.
• Define and drive adoption of architectural patterns (event-driven microservices, multi-tenant SaaS, distributed locking/coordination) across multiple engineering teams.
• Partner with Product, Risk/Compliance, and cross-functional engineering teams (Payments, Onboarding, DevOps) to translate business goals into platform capabilities.
• Establish and champion engineering best practices: blameless post-mortems, proactive health monitoring, and structural fixes over firefighting.
• Directly mentor senior and staff-level engineers; act as a force multiplier for technical decision-making across the org.
• Drive down operational toil through automation, self-service tooling, and platform abstractions that let other teams move faster independently.
• Represent engineering in architecture reviews, technical due diligence, and cross-org planning.

Requirements:

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of owning systems at scale in production.
• Proven experience architecting and scaling backend platforms handling significant user growth (e. g., 10x-20x) or transaction volume, ideally in fintech, payments, or another regulated domain.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems design: microservices, async workflow orchestration (e. g., Temporal or equivalent), event-driven architecture, and data consistency trade-offs.
• Strong hands-on experience with at least one of Java or Python, and the ability to review and guide code across languages/stacks.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure and platform tooling (AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD pipelines) and observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or similar).
• Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional engineering initiatives and mentor engineers.
• Excellent written and verbal communication; comfortable driving alignment across engineering, product, and compliance stakeholders.
• Experience working with enterprise ERP integrations (SAP, Oracle, or similar) is a plus, especially around master data sync and financial workflows.
• Hands-on experience with agentic development is required; you regularly build with and orchestrate AI coding agents (e. g., Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot Agent Mode) as part of your day-to-day engineering workflow, not just as an occasional autocomplete tool.
• Working knowledge of ETL and data pipeline design is a plus; hands-on experience with AWS Glue is preferred. SFTP/EDI, webhooks, API gateways, batch reconciliation.

Tech Environment:

• Java, Python, JavaScript/ReactJS, Spring Boot, FastAPI, Django, Flask, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, Kafka, SQS, Celery, AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, GitHub Actions/GitLab CI, Temporal, gRPC, GraphQL, OpenAPI, Keycloak, OAuth2/OIDC, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, AWS Glue, Airflow (ETL), SAP/Oracle ERP integration connectors, EDI/SFTP, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot (agentic/AI-assisted development).