Description :

Role : Principal Software Engineer (Individual Contributor / Tech Lead)

Location : - Bangalore (On-Site)

Experience : - 8 to 10 Years

Domain : - High-Concurrency Payments & Autonomous Finance

The 2026 Vision : Why This Role is Mission-Critical

In 2026, the global fintech landscape has moved past simple "money movement." We are now in the age of Hyper-Scale Autonomous Finance. The platform you will architect handles more than just transactions; it handles identity, risk, real-time credit scoring, and cross-border settlement in the blink of an eye.

As a Principal Engineer (SDE 4), you are the technical heartbeat of this ecosystem. You aren't here to just write code; you are here to design the "digital rails" for a nations economy. Your decisions will influence how $100B+ in annual volume flows through thousands of microservices, ensuring that even under the stress of 50,000+ transactions per second, the system remains invisible, silent, and perfect.

Advanced Technical Responsibilities :

1. High-Concurrency Distributed Systems :

- Transaction Atomicity at Scale : You will design and implement distributed transaction managers that solve for the "Double Spend" problem across heterogeneous microservices without sacrificing latency.

- Event-Driven Architectures : Architecting high-throughput messaging systems using Kafka or NATS. You will ensure that non-critical paths (like notification or analytics) are fully decoupled from the "hot path" of a payment.

- Self-Healing Systems : Designing "Circuit Breakers" and "Adaptive Throttling" mechanisms that proactively protect the infrastructure from cascading failures during peak events like festive sales.

2. Polyglot Persistence & Data Mastery :

- Persistence Strategy : Choosing the right tool for the right dataMySQL for ACID-compliant ledgers, Cassandra or DynamoDB for high-velocity transaction history, and Redis for ultra-low latency session management.

- Database Sharding : Implementing custom sharding logic to distribute terabytes of data across dozens of nodes, ensuring that "hot keys" (like a major merchants data) don't create performance bottlenecks.

- Data Sovereignty & Privacy : Working with Legal and Compliance teams to architect "Data Localization" layers that automatically route PII according to regional laws (RBI, GDPR, or GCC regulations).

3. Performance & Latency Engineering :

- p99 Optimization : You will be obsessed with p99 latencies. You will profile Java/Go codebases to shave off 5ms from the JVM startup or 2ms from an RPC call, knowing that at our scale, milliseconds equal millions.

- Network Topology : Optimizing inter-service communication using gRPC (HTTP/2) and service meshes (Istio/Linkerd) to minimize network overhead and maximize security.

Leadership & The "Multiplier" Effect :

- Architectural Stewardship : Design Review Committee (DRC) : You will lead the DRC, acting as the final technical authority for every major feature. You will challenge senior engineers to simplify their designs and prioritize "Maintainability" over "Cleverness."

- The Bridge to Product : Translating ambiguous business goals (e.g., "We want to support CBDC settlements") into concrete, multi-phase technical blueprints that engineering teams can execute.

- Mentorship & Engineering Culture : Leveling Up the Team : You will spend 20-30% of your time mentoring SDE-2s and SDE-3s. You will lead "Tech Talks," "Internal Hackathons," and deep-dive "Post-Mortem" sessions to ensure that every failure becomes a learning milestone.

- Open Source Advocacy : Encouraging the team to contribute back to the open-source projects we use (like Kubernetes, Kafka, or Spring) and positioning the company as a "Tech Brand" in the global community.

The Domain Challenges : Fintech 2026

Real-Time Risk & Fraud Mitigation :

- You will collaborate with Data Science teams to integrate ML models directly into the payment hot-path. The challenge? Running a 100-variable fraud check in under 15ms without increasing the fail rate for genuine customers.

The "Invisible" Checkout :

- Architecting the next generation of 1-click payments and biometric-authenticated flows. You will be responsible for the "Trust Layer" that allows a user to pay without ever seeing a traditional "Payment Page."

Advanced Infrastructure & Observability (SRE Synergy) :

- Infrastructure as Code (IaC) : You will partner with DevOps Leads to define the global Terraform standards. You will treat the infrastructure as an extension of your application code.

- Zero-Downtime Deployments : Leading the transition to pure GitOps workflows, enabling hundreds of daily deployments via automated Canary and Blue-Green strategies.

- Observability Mastery : Defining the "Golden Signals" (Latency, Errors, Traffic, Saturation). You aren't satisfied with a dashboard; you want automated anomaly detection that alerts the team before a failure occurs.

Career Growth & Performance Metrics :

How Success is Measured (KPIs) :

- System Reliability : Maintaining 99.995% uptime for core transaction services.

- Architectural Debt : Reducing the "Technical Debt Ratio" by 15% year-over-year through strategic refactoring.

- Revenue per Engineer : Increasing the efficiency of the pod by building reusable frameworks

that cut down feature GTM (Go-to-Market) time by 30%.

- Mentorship Success : Tracking the number of engineers who advance to the next level under your direct influence.

Required Pedigree & Qualifications :

- Education : B.Tech/M.Tech in Computer Science from a Tier-1 institute (IITs, NITs, BITS) or a comparable global pedigree.

- Technical Breadth : Expert-level mastery of Java, Golang, or C++. Deep understanding of the Linux kernel, memory management, and garbage collection tuning.

- Experience : 8 - 10 years of experience (maximum for this bracket) building high-scale platforms. You must have survived at least one major "Black Friday" or "Festive Sale" scale event.

- Soft Skills : Exceptional communication. You should be as comfortable explaining a "split-brain" scenario to an engineer as you are explaining a "Success Rate" dip to the CEO.

The Culture Fit : The "Invisible" Requirements

- Extreme Ownership : You treat the code as if your own money is flowing through it. If

something breaks, you don't look for someone to blame; you look for the fix.

- Pragmatism over Dogma : You know when to use a simple "Monolith" and when to pivot to a complex "Microservice." You don't follow trends; you follow data.

- Low Ego, High Ambition : You want to build the best product in the world, and you don't care if the winning idea comes from an intern or yourself.

Why Join This Journey?

- The Scale : Solving problems that only exist when you process 50 million+ transactions daily.

- The Autonomy : As an SDE-4, you own your domain. You are the "CTO of your pod."

- Wealth Creation : We believe in rewarding builders. Our ESOP policy is one of the most aggressive in the industry, designed to turn long-term engineers into partners.