Principal Engineer

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YOUR MISSION PUMA is building a world-class Direct-to-Consumer engineering organisation from the ground up at our new GCC TechHub in Pune. The Principal Engineer – Integration is a critical org-wide technical leadership role within D2C Platform Engineering, responsible for designing, governing, and evolving the integration fabric that connects every product capability, commerce service, and external partner across the DTC ecosystem.

This is not a team-scoped role. As a Principal Engineer, you operate across all four engineering organisations - Consumer Experience, Consumer Intelligence & Engagement, Core Commerce Platform, and D2C Platform Engineering - and your work defines how these systems talk to each other. You will own the API gateway strategy, integration architecture standards, and developer enablement practices that underpin PUMA's ability to build and deploy capabilities at speed and scale.

You will be a practitioner-leader: hands-on enough to make architectural decisions with conviction, and senior enough to influence engineering culture, drive standards adoption, and mentor a generation of engineers building PUMA's digital future. You will partner directly with the Director of Platform Engineering and peer Principal Engineers to shape an integration platform that is observable, resilient, AI-native, and built to evolve.

As PUMA continues to scale its DTC Engineering organisation, Principal Engineers are expected to be visible technical role models. These roles are office-based and require regular in-person collaboration to accelerate decision-making, strengthen technical cohesion, and build engineering excellence from the ground up.

Key Responsibilities & Scope of Ownership:

Integration Architecture & API Platform Own the end-to-end integration architecture for the DTC platform - defining how internal services, packaged solutions, and external partners connect, communicate, and exchange data.

Lead the design and governance of PUMA's API gateway strategy on Apigee, including policy framework, traffic management, authentication, rate limiting, and API product management.

Define and enforce API design standards - RESTful patterns, GraphQL schema design principles, versioning strategy, deprecation policy, and contract-first development practices.

Architect the GraphQL API layer that serves consumer-facing surfaces (web, mobile, agentic commerce), including schema stitching, federation strategy, and resolver performance optimisation.

Design event-driven integration patterns using message brokers and streaming platforms to ensure loose coupling and high resilience across commerce and fulfilment services.

Own the integration reference architecture for PUMA's composable commerce stack - ensuring Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Fluent Commerce OMS, payment gateways, and external logistics partners integrate cleanly and durably.

API Governance & Developer Enablement Establish and maintain an API governance framework - including design reviews, approval gates, documentation standards, and quality metrics - applied consistently across all engineering organisations.

Build and own the internal API developer portal and integration catalogue, enabling product squads to discover, consume, and contribute integration capabilities efficiently.

Define and enforce integration testing standards - contract testing, API regression suites, and integration environment strategy - across the platform.

Champion developer productivity through reusable integration libraries, SDK patterns, and shared tooling that reduce the time-to-integrate for product squads.

Produce clear architectural decision records (ADRs), integration playbooks, and runbooks that codify patterns and accelerate onboarding for new engineering squads.

AI-Native Integration Engineering Embed AI-native practices into the integration platform - from AI-assisted API design and automated contract generation to intelligent anomaly detection in integration pipelines.

Architect integration patterns for agentic commerce and LLM-driven workflows, including tool-calling APIs, model context orchestration, and AI agent connectivity to commerce and fulfilment backends.

Evaluate and adopt AI tooling (code generation, API testing, observability) that improves integration engineering velocity and quality across the platform.

Partner with the Consumer Intelligence & Engagement team to ensure ML and GenAI services are exposed and consumed through well-governed, performant integration contracts.

Reliability, Observability & Security Define and own non-functional requirements for the integration layer - latency budgets, availability SLOs, retry and circuit-breaker patterns, and graceful degradation strategies.

Design and implement comprehensive observability for all integration touchpoints - distributed tracing, API metrics dashboards, error budget tracking, and alerting on integration health.

Own the security posture of the integration layer - OAuth 2.0 implementation, mutual TLS, secrets management, payload encryption, and PCI-DSS-compliant data handling for payment integrations.

Lead capacity planning and load testing for critical integration paths, particularly during peak commerce events (product launches, seasonal peaks).

Define incident response and escalation protocols for integration failures affecting consumer-facing surfaces.

Technical Leadership & Mentorship Act as the senior-most technical authority on integration across all DTC engineering squads - providing architecture guidance, design review, and escalation support organisation-wide.

Mentor and develop Lead and Senior Engineers in integration engineering patterns, API design, and distributed systems thinking.

Drive a culture of engineering excellence - championing code quality, test coverage, documentation standards, and continuous improvement in integration practices.

Represent PUMA's integration engineering perspective in cross-functional architecture forums and contribute to the broader DTC engineering strategy.

Collaborate with vendor and partner engineering teams to define and enforce integration contracts, onboarding standards, and quality expectations.

YOUR TALENT Key Requirements: 10–15 years of progressive software engineering experience, with at least 4–5 years focused on integration architecture, API platform engineering, or distributed systems at scale.

Deep expertise in integration patterns, with proven experience managing enterprise integrations across open-source and packaged solutions.

Experience with enterprise application integration platforms (e.g., TIBCO, IBM App Connect, MuleSoft) is a plus.

Expertise with GraphQL - including schema design, federation, resolver optimisation, subscriptions, and the operational trade-offs of GraphQL at scale.

Proven experience designing and governing enterprise API platforms on Apigee or equivalent - including API proxy design, policy management, developer portals, analytics.

Strong command of RESTful API design, OpenAPI/Swagger specification, versioning strategies, and backward-compatibility management.

Solid experience with event-driven architectures and messaging systems such as Apache Kafka, Google Pub/Sub - including event schema design, consumer group management, and dead-letter handling.

Demonstrated ability to operate as an org-wide technical authority - influencing architecture across multiple teams and driving standards adoption without direct line authority.

Track record of building developer enablement assets - internal API catalogues, integration SDKs, documentation frameworks, and onboarding tooling.

Experience with contract testing methodologies and integration testing frameworks at scale.

Strong security engineering knowledge in the context of API platforms - OAuth 2.0, OIDC, JWT, API key management, secrets vaulting, and PCI-relevant data handling.

Familiarity with distributed tracing, API observability tooling, and SLO/error-budget frameworks applied to integration layers.

Excellent written and verbal communication - ability to produce high-quality ADRs, technical proposals, and integration standards that are clear, persuasive, and actionable.

Experience with AI/LLM API integration patterns - tool-calling APIs, prompt management services, and model routing infrastructure.

Background in fashion, retail, sports, or DTC commerce environments.

Familiarity with developer experience (DX) tooling and internal developer portals.

Contributions to open-source projects in the API, GraphQL, or integration tooling ecosystem.

Key Technologies:

API Gateway - Apigee/Kong or equivalent, API policy design, developer portal, traffic management GraphQL - Federation, schema stitching, resolvers, subscriptions, GQL performance REST & Standards - OpenAPI 3.x, RESTful design, versioning, contract testing Event Streaming - Apache Kafka/Google Pub/Sub or AWS Kinesis, event schema design Security- OAuth 2.0, OIDC, JWT, mTLS, secrets management (Vault / GCP Secret Manager) Enterprise Integrations - Third-Party SaaS Integration (Payments, SFCC, Commerce Tools), Master Data systems, ERP, Supply Chain, OMS AI Integration - LLM tool-calling APIs, model gateway patterns, AI-native integration workflows Cloud Platform - GCP - API services, managed messaging, cloud-native deployment or AWS equivalent Languages - Node.js, Python; Java or Go for performance-critical integration services

PUMA's Principal Engineers are expected to operate as enterprise-wide technical leaders who raise the capability of the entire engineering organisation - not just their immediate area of ownership. The following expectations apply to all Principal Engineers at PUMA.

Technical Leadership & Standards Own technical standards and architecture patterns for your domain and drive consistent adoption across all engineering organisations.

Produce high-quality architectural decision records, technical proposals, and engineering guidelines that are clear, considered, and actionable.

Engage in and lead design reviews and architecture forums with intellectual rigour and commercial awareness.

Demonstrate deep, current technical expertise and a genuine commitment to continuous learning in your domain.

Craft & Quality Hold a consistently high bar for code quality, test coverage, documentation, and production readiness - and actively lift the bar for the teams around you.

Champion AI-native engineering practices: use AI tooling to accelerate development, improve quality, and solve problems that would previously have required more time or resource.

Balance the tension between pragmatism and perfectionism - know when good enough is right and when it is not.

Influence & Collaboration Build strong working relationships across engineering, product, and vendor teams based on technical credibility, clarity of thinking, and reliability.

Influence architecture and engineering decisions across teams without direct authority - through well-reasoned positions, clear communication, and genuine curiosity about others' constraints.

Operate effectively in ambiguity, providing technical direction and confidence to teams when requirements or priorities are unclear.

Mentorship & Culture Building Invest meaningfully in the development of Lead and Senior Engineers - through design reviews, pair programming, code review feedback, and open technical conversation.

Build a culture of curiosity, psychological safety, and high technical standards - where engineers feel safe to challenge assumptions, propose bold ideas, and learn from failure.

Act as a visible culture-builder as PUMA scales its DTC Engineering organisation: lead by example, celebrate engineering excellence, and bring energy and optimism to the task of building something from the ground up.

Building PUMA's Future

This is a rare opportunity to help define the integration backbone of a global sports brand's DTC engineering platform from day one. You will have the scope, support, and mandate to build something that matters - both for the millions of consumers who interact with PUMA's products and for the engineers who will work alongside you. If you are excited by the combination of deep technical challenge, genuine organisational influence, and the chance to build a world-class engineering culture, we want to hear from you.

PUMA provides equal opportunities for all job applicants, regardless of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, or disability. Equality for all is one of the core principles at PUMA and we do not tolerate any form of harassment or discrimination.

At PUMA, every application is reviewed by real people who are committed to fairness, transparency, and equal opportunity - no matter your background, identity, or experience.To ensure our process stays true to these values, no automated systems or AI tools are used to make hiring decisions. Every decision is made by real people -with real judgment and accountability. We may use functions supported by Artificial Intelligence (AI) to carry out isolated organizational steps, such as scheduling interviews. These functions have no influence on decisions in the application process. We believe in creating spaces where everyone is welcome, celebrated, and empowered to contribute authentically. Because at PUMA, whoever wants to play, can play.

PUMA is a global sports brand creating footwear, apparel, and accessories that inspire athletes and everyday movers. The PUMA Group owns PUMA, Cobra Golf, and stichd, operates in 120+ countries, and has around 22,000 employees worldwide.