Principal Engineer - Backend Systems

Responsibilities :

- Lead architecture, scaling, and implementation of backend systems for AI, data, and platform use cases.

- Manage and mentor 10-30 engineers, including EMs, Staff, and Senior Engineers across cross-functional pods.

- Collaborate with Product, Design, GTM, and Founders to align the engineering roadmap with business outcomes.

- Own and deliver projects related to privacy infrastructure, AI pipelines, system reliability, and distributed processing.

- Establish engineering excellence through CI/CD, observability, code quality, and robust testing practices.

- Foster a high-performance culture through strong leadership, technical depth, and rapid iterative development.

- Advocate and implement structured processes, including design docs, PRDs, and scalable review practices.

- Contribute hands-on where needed to unblock teams, provide architectural direction, and shape core platforms.

Requirements :

- Experience designing scalable microservices and distributed systems in production.

- Deep familiarity with cloud-native architecture (AWS/GCP), Kafka, and data infrastructure.

- Prior exposure to AI/ML-based systems, privacy-first architecture, and performance engineering.

- Strong technical mentorship and team-building skills.

- Bonus : Experience with clustering/ML models like DBScan, FAISS, or leading open-source tooling.