Principal Backend Engineer

We are seeking an accomplished Principal Staff Backend Engineer to lead the design and development of scalable, secure, and resilient enterprise systems. You will set technical direction, mentor engineers, and architect platforms that power mission-critical products. This is a hands-on leadership role that spans cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, data platforms, and AI integration.

• Architect and Design:
  Define large scale distributed architectures for reliability, scalability, and performance.
• Technical Leadership:
  Drive engineering standards, code quality, and operational excellence while mentoring senior engineers.
• Modern Services:
  Build and optimize microservices, APIs, and data pipelines using current enterprise technologies.
• Enterprise Delivery:
  Meet strict security, compliance, and performance requirements for global customers.
• Innovation:
  Evaluate and adopt emerging technologies where they add measurable value.

• Expert in at least one of Python, Java, or C++
• Bonus:
  Go, Rust, or Scala

• Cloud: AWS, Azure, or GCP (multi-cloud experience is a plus)
• Containers and Orchestration:
  Docker, Kubernetes
• Infrastructure as Code:
  Terraform, Pulumi, Cloud Formation
• Serverless: AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Azure Functions
• Networking and Service Mesh:
  Istio, Linkerd, Envoy, NGINX
• CI/CD:
  Git Hub Actions, Git Lab CI, Argo CD, Jenkins, Spinnaker

• API Styles: REST, Graph
  
  QL, gRPC
• Architectures:
  Microservices, event-driven, CQRS, Saga patterns
• Gateway and Management:
  Kong, Apigee, AWS API Gateway, NGINX

• Databases:
  Postgre
  
  SQL, MySQL, Oracle
• No
  
  SQL and Caching:
  Dynamo
  
  DB, Cassandra, Mongo
  
  DB, Redis, Memcached
• Streaming and Batch:
  Kafka, Pulsar, Spark, Flink, Airflow, dbt
• Analytics and Warehousing:
  Snowflake, Big Query, Redshift, Databricks
• Search and Indexing:
  Elasticsearch, Open Search, Solr
• Object Storage and Lakehouse: S3, GCS, ADLS, Delta Lake, Iceberg, Hudi

• ML Frameworks and Serving:
  Tensor Flow, PyTorch, ONNX Runtime, Triton Inference Server
• Feature Stores and Pipelines:
  Feast, Kubeflow, MLflow
• AI Systems Integration:
  Vector DBs (Pinecone, Milvus, Weaviate), RAG patterns, embeddings

• Auth and Identity: OAuth2, OIDC, SAML, JWT
• Secrets and KMS:
  Hashi Corp Vault, AWS KMS, Azure Key Vault, GCP KMS
• Compliance Awareness: SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI DSS
• App Sec: SAST, DAST, dependency scanning, SBOM

• Monitoring and Tracing:
  Prometheus, Grafana, Open Telemetry, Jaeger, ELK/EFK
• Resilience:
  Circuit breakers, rate limiting, backoff, bulkheads, chaos engineering
• Performance:
  Profiling, load testing, capacity planning, autoscaling

• 10+ years of backend engineering experience including 3+ years at Staff or Principal level
• Proven success designing and operating distributed systems at scale
• Strong skills in algorithms, data structures, concurrency, and performance tuning
• Experience leading architecture reviews and influencing large engineering teams
• Clear communication with executives, product, security, and cross-functional partners