Happiest Minds Technologies - Principal Software Engineer - Scala

Scala Tech Champion / Principal Back-End Engineer

We are seeking an accomplished Scala Tech Champion with 10+ years of software engineering experience to provide technical leadership within a cross-functional product team responsible for a customer-facing platform.

In this role, you will lead the design and evolution of scalable, highly available back-end services in a cloud-native, event-driven environment.

You will act as a recognized authority on Scala engineering, distributed systems, and software architecture - setting technical direction, establishing engineering standards, mentoring colleagues, and solving complex challenges across teams.

The position requires strong autonomy, deep architectural expertise, pragmatic decision-making, and close collaboration with Product, Front-End, Platform, and SRE teams.

What will you do?

- Define and champion the technical vision for Scala-based back-end services and platforms.

- Architect, develop, and evolve scalable, resilient, and highly available distributed systems.

- Establish and promote Scala engineering standards, patterns, and development best practices.

- Write clean, maintainable, testable, and high-performance code, primarily using Scala.

- Lead architectural decisions involving microservices, event-driven systems, data consistency, and service integration.

- Guide the application of functional programming principles using technologies such as Cats and Cats Effect.

- Drive the effective use of Pekko/Akka, Kafka, Event Sourcing, CQRS, and Domain-Driven Design.

- Identify and address architectural risks, performance bottlenecks, scalability constraints, and technical debt.

- Collaborate with Product and other engineering disciplines to translate business needs into pragmatic, user-centric technical solutions.

- Mentor engineers through technical coaching, pair programming, design discussions, and constructive code reviews.

- Facilitate architecture reviews and technical knowledge-sharing sessions across teams.

- Define and uphold standards for code quality, security, reliability, observability, and performance.

- Improve CI/CD pipelines, engineering workflows, and delivery practices.

- Partner with SRE and Platform teams to improve operational readiness, fault tolerance, and production resilience.

- Evaluate emerging technologies and guide their adoption when they deliver clear business or engineering value.

Required knowledge and experience :

- 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with substantial experience designing and delivering complex back-end systems.

- Deep expertise in Scala and its ecosystem, including Pekko/Akka, Cats, and Cats Effect.

- Strong understanding of functional programming concepts and their practical application in production systems.

- Proven experience acting as a technical lead, principal engineer, architect, or technology champion.

- Strong Java knowledge; Python experience is an advantage.

- Extensive practical experience with Event Sourcing, CQRS, and Domain-Driven Design.

- Proven ability to design, evolve, and scale distributed microservice architectures.

- Experience building high-performance, resilient, secure, and observable APIs.

- Deep understanding of distributed systems, concurrency, consistency models, fault tolerance, and recovery patterns.

- Hands-on experience with Kafka and event-driven architecture at scale.

- Strong cloud-native development experience on AWS.

- Advanced experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and modern deployment practices.

- Experience with relational and non-relational databases, including data-modeling and performance considerations.

- Strong understanding of observability practices, including metrics, logging, tracing, alerting, and production diagnostics.

- Experience improving CI/CD pipelines and automated testing strategies.

- Demonstrated success in Agile, cross-functional product-development environments.

- Ability to balance long-term architectural goals with pragmatic and incremental delivery.

What will you bring as a colleague?

- A technology-champion mindset and the ability to inspire engineering excellence across teams.

- Strong technical judgment and the confidence to challenge assumptions constructively.

- A pragmatic approach that balances technical quality, delivery speed, operational risk, and business value.

- A growth mindset and a genuine commitment to developing yourself and those around you.

- The ability to mentor engineers and communicate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

- A collaborative and inclusive leadership style that builds alignment without relying on formal authority.

- Ownership, curiosity, and the determination to improve systems, processes, and engineering culture.

- Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English.