Principal Software Engineer – Data Backend

The ideal candidate will bring deep software engineering expertise to complex data systems, helping shape technical direction, lead high-impact engineering initiatives, mentor senior engineers, and remain closely involved in system design, coding, performance optimization, and production operations.

This is not a conventional data engineering or people-management role. The position is suited for a technical leader who can influence architecture across multiple teams while continuing to build and operate critical systems.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the architecture and delivery of major data-intensive backend products or platform initiatives.
• Design and build scalable systems across areas such as batch and stream processing, data ingestion, orchestration, semantic systems, ontology layers, analytics, query processing, and data products.
• Drive system design decisions focused on scalability, reliability, maintainability, observability, performance, and data quality.
• Remain deeply hands-on with critical code, technical designs, architecture reviews, and production systems.
• Establish and uphold engineering standards for code quality, testing, operability, reliability, and system design.
• Identify and implement performance and cost optimizations across distributed compute, storage, querying, and data-serving layers.
• Provide technical direction across multiple engineering teams while remaining actively involved in implementation and delivery.
• Lead organization-wide or cross-functional technical initiatives from strategy and design through execution.
• Mentor senior and staff-level engineers and help strengthen engineering practices, technical judgment, and system-design capabilities across the organization.
• Drive cross-team technical alignment and resolve complex architectural and engineering challenges.
• Evaluate technology choices and architectural trade-offs for high-scale data and backend systems.
• Contribute to improving system observability, reliability, operational maturity, and production readiness.
• Continuously identify opportunities to improve engineering efficiency, system performance, and long-term maintainability.

Required Qualifications & Experience

• Typically 12–17 years of software engineering experience, with sustained Staff+ or Principal-level technical scope.
• Proven experience building high-scale, data-intensive software products or distributed systems from the ground up and operating them in production.
• Exceptional coding ability with strong standards for code quality, testing, reliability, operability, and maintainability.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems, backend architecture, data systems, and performance engineering.
• Strong understanding of scalability, fault tolerance, distributed computation, storage, querying, and system performance trade-offs.
• Demonstrated ability to lead large technical initiatives spanning multiple teams without relying on formal management authority.
• Ability to influence technical strategy and architecture while remaining deeply involved in implementation.
• Strong mentoring capabilities with a track record of raising the technical bar for senior engineers.
• Experience working with open-source technologies and building systems around open-source components is strongly preferred.
• Strong understanding of software engineering principles beyond simply assembling managed cloud services.

Relevant Technical Background

Candidates with experience building or scaling the following types of systems are particularly relevant:

• Distributed query or analytics engines
• Large-scale batch or stream processing systems
• Data-intensive backend platforms
• Data products and serving systems
• High-performance ingestion infrastructure
• Semantic or ontology platforms
• Distributed storage and compute systems
• Performance-oriented data processing systems
• Open-source distributed systems and infrastructure

Exact technology keywords are less important than demonstrated depth in engineering judgment, architecture, coding, scalability, and ownership.

What We Are Looking For

We are looking for a Principal-level software engineer who continues to code and build. The ideal candidate combines architectural depth with exceptional implementation skills and can move comfortably between high-level technical strategy and low-level engineering details.

You should be capable of taking ownership of ambiguous, technically complex problems, influencing multiple engineering teams, and delivering systems that operate reliably at scale.

This Role Is Not a Fit For

• Primarily CRUD or conventional SaaS backend development
• Traditional ETL, BI, or reporting-focused data engineering
• Data engineering limited primarily to assembling managed services
• Platform operations roles without significant software engineering depth
• Candidates with narrow expertise in individual technologies without broader systems knowledge
• Pure architecture roles where hands-on coding is no longer part of the day-to-day work
• Engineering management positions without continued technical ownership

Key Competencies

• Exceptional software engineering and coding ability
• Strong distributed systems expertise
• Deep system design and architecture capabilities
• Performance and cost optimization
• Technical leadership and cross-team influence
• Production engineering and operational excellence
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills
• Mentoring and technical development of senior engineers
• High ownership and engineering judgment

Must-Have Skills

• Distributed Systems
• Software Architecture
• Backend Engineering

Good-to-Have Skills

• Apache Kafka
• Query Optimization
• Open Source