Principal​/Software Engineer

Nexthink is the leader in digital employee experience management software. The company provides IT leaders with unprecedented insight allowing them to see, diagnose and fix issues at scale impacting employees anywhere, with any applicationor network, before employees notice the issue. As the first solution to allow IT to progress from reactive problem solving to proactive optimization, Nexthink enables its more than 1,300 customers to provide better digital experiences to more than 18 million employees.

Dual headquartered in Lausanne, Switzerland and Boston, Massachusetts, Nexthink has 9 offices worldwide.

#LI-Hybrid

We are looking for a Principal/Staff Backend Software Engineer to lead the technical strategy, architecture, and implementation of our large-scale AI chat agent platform. This system is designed to support
20+ million users globally, making it one of the most ambitious backend initiatives at Nexthink.

As a Principal/Staff Engineer, you will go beyond implementation: you willset technical direction, influence cross-team design decisions, and serve as a trusted advisor to both engineering leadership and product.

You’lltackle problems ofscale, reliability, and performancewhile partnering with AI/ML, Infra, and Security teams to build production-ready AI experiences.

This is ahigh-impact, high-ownershiprole whereyou’llbe entrusted to make foundational architectural decisions and mentor senior engineers, ensuring Nexthink’s AI systems are built to scale with the future.

Responsibilities

Define anddrive technical vision and architectural strategy for the AI chat backend platform.

Lead design ofhighly scalable, low-latency, distributed systemssupporting 20M+ global users.

Partner with product, infra, and AI/ML teams toalign engineering strategy with business objectives.

Provide technical leadership across multiple teams, influencing design patterns, coding standards, and best practices.

Architect and deliverfault-tolerant APIs and servicescapable of handling large-scale real-time workloads.

Championobservability, performance, and resiliencyacross the stack.

Act as amentor and multiplier, raising the technical bar and helping senior engineers grow.

Lead technical deep dives, design reviews, and roadmap alignment discussionswith leadership.

Ensuresecurity, compliance, and cost-efficiency are embedded in design from day one.

10+ years of backend engineering experience, with3+ years in Staff or Principal-level roles.

Proven success designing and scaling backend systems fortens of millions of usersorhigh-throughput real-time systems.

Expert inJava (17+), Python, or Node.js, withstrongbackground indistributed systems, concurrency, and high availability.

Hands-onexpertiseincloud-native architectures(AWS or equivalent),Kubernetes/ECS, and containerized deployments.

Strong experience building and operatingmission-critical services with SLAs in production.

Deep understanding ofAPI design, streaming data, and event-driven systems.

Exceptional communication skills — able to influence cross-functional teams and leadership with clear technical direction.

Track recordofmentoring and elevating engineering teams.

Nice to Have (Differentiators)

Deep knowledge ofJava frameworks(Spring Boot, Micronaut).

Experience product ionizing

LLM-powered systems(RAG, fine-tuning, observability, evaluation frameworks).

Priorownership ofmulti-region or global-scale deployments.

Background in performance optimization, latency reduction, and cost scalingatglobalscale.

Familiarity with Git Ops , Terraform, CI/CD, and platform engineering practices.

Experience buildingenterprise chat or messaging systems.

Strong understanding ofdata security, compliance, and regulatory frameworks(SOC2, ISO, GDPR).

We are the pioneers and trailblazers of a global IT Market Category (DEX) that is shaping the future of how the world works, giving our customers’ IT Teams total digital visibility across their enterprise. Our innovative solutions integrate real-time analytics, automation, and employee feedback across all endpoints. This enables our IT teams to solve complex technical challenges, create ever more productive workplaces, and…