Principal Engineer - Backend
Leads the architecture and operation of large-scale distributed backend infrastructure, including databases, processing systems, APIs, and migrations. The role requires 10+ years of experience, principal-level technical influence, and deep expertise in reliability and systems at scale.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Design and lead major database and processing-system initiatives.
- Design performant protocols and APIs, including customer-facing label-format APIs, across product and engineering.
- Build robust distributed systems and reason rigorously about failure modes and behavior under load.
- Level up engineers across the company through design reviews, pairing, and mentorship.
Requirements
- 10+ years building large-scale backend infrastructure applications, including several years operating at staff or principal level with company-wide technical influence.
- Deep expertise in distributed systems, including databases, processing systems, replication, partitioning, queuing, and caching.
- Rigorous understanding of how distributed systems fail and behave under load at scale.
- Experience leading large-scale data migrations and system-splitting or re-architecture projects involving real customer data.
- Experience owning production reliability and operations, including monitoring, alerting, and DevOps/SRE.
- Track record of raising engineering quality across teams through architecture reviews, code reviews, testing, rollout, and monitoring practices.
- Ability to influence without authority and drive technical alignment across teams.
- Experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems in production.
- Strong problem-solving skills and a first-principles approach.
- Willingness to work across the stack and own ambiguous problems autonomously.
Tech Stack
- Python
- TypeScript
- React
- Kubernetes
- Google Cloud
- PyTorch
- CUDA
- Ray
Compensation & Benefits
- Competitive salary, commission, and meaningful equity in a high-growth startup.
- 25 days annual leave plus UK public holidays.
- Annual learning and development budget.
- Travel for customer visits, events, and conferences across the UK and Europe.
- Company lunches twice a week.
- Monthly socials and bi-annual team offsites.
Skills
Python, TypeScript, React, Kubernetes, GCP, PyTorch, CUDA, Ray, Distributed Systems, Databases, Data Migrations, Monitoring, Alerting, DevOps, SRE
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