Principal Engineer

Responsibilities:

• Parachute Engineering: Drop into the gnarliest cross-team fires, performance cliffs, data integrity scares, and migration landmines and drive them to root cause and fix them (hands-on keyboard).
• 0-to-1 Prototypes: Turn the CTO's "what if" into a working spike in days: internal platforms, security primitives, or production AI pipelines.
• Security and Compliance Engineering: Threat-model features before they ship, respond to fleet-wide CVEs, and design controls that pass RBI and SOC 2 audits without strangling developer velocity.
• AI Leverage: Push our agentic-coding rollout, LLM MR-review pipelines, and self-hosted model experiments further. Measure honestly, and kill what doesn't yield real ROI.
• Architecture Pressure-Testing: Audit multi-tenancy, token security, BFF hardening, and PostgreSQL at scale (Patroni, PgBouncer, connection pool lock contention) before problems become outages.
• Technical Due Diligence: Run build-vs-buy analyses (PAM, observability, databases) and write decision memos that satisfy both engineers and bank auditors.

Requirements:

• Principal-Grade Depth: 8+ years shipping and operating distributed production systems with the scar tissue to prove it.
• Polyglot Fluency: Hands-on production work in at least 4 of PHP (Laravel), TypeScript, Python, Go, Rust, and Lua.
• Infra and Linux Chops: Kubernetes (EKS) and container internals, Docker Swarm, HAProxy/OpenResty, Cloudflare Zero Trust, and debugging fluency from strace to Grafana.
• PostgreSQL Mastery: Deep knowledge of replication topologies, PgBouncer pooling, lock behavior under heavy load, and Patroni.
• Security Instincts: Beyond basic OWASP, hands-on reasoning about mTLS, token binding, IDOR/BOLA, key custody, and RBI compliance requirements.
• AI-Native Workflow: Daily user of agentic coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code, Aider, etc. ) who knows where they break and how to teach others to use them rigorously.
• Sharp Technical Writing: Able to make hard decisions legible through clear RFCs, decision memos, and postmortems.

Nice-to-Haves:

• Fintech/BFSI domain exposure (loan origination, underwriting, core banking integrations).
• Fleet-scale CI/CD on self-hosted GitLab + supply-chain security (SBOMs, dependency tracking).
• Experience self-hosting LLMs or building evaluation harnesses for production AI.