Staff Engineer / Principal Engineer, System Design & Delivery (Next.js, Azure, Data-Intensive Web Product)

What you’ll do:

• Lead the system design and hands-on delivery of a data-intensive web product on Microsoft Azure. You own how the application is shaped end-to-end — services, APIs, the Next.js layer, integrations, security, and how it behaves under load.
• This role is defined by two things: designing the system and shipping a performant application. You write the code for the most critical paths and own them from design through production. Architecture without implementation, or features that do not hold latency, throughput, and cost targets, is not the job.
• Design how the product queries, processes, and presents large volumes of data — modeling, SQL performance, caching, pagination, aggregation, search, and asynchronous processing — and ship dashboards, reports, and data exploration on top of existing data platforms. Every design choice is judged by whether the product stays fast, correct, and operable as data volume and concurrency grow.
• Choose and document the system shape (modular monolith, microservices, synchronous, or event-driven) against performance, consistency, security, cost, and operational complexity. You make the trade-offs explicit, including when a simpler design is enough.
• Set standards for authentication and authorization, observability, automated testing, code review, and continuous delivery, using AI-assisted engineering as part of how the team builds. Partner with the teams that own ingestion, pipelines, and the data platform. You own how the application queries, secures, and serves that data at production performance.

What you’ll need:

• A Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, mathematics, or another quantitative field. A master’s degree or PhD is a plus.
• Experience as a Staff Engineer, Principal Engineer, Software Architect, or equivalent, designing and shipping large-scale, high-performance web applications and backend systems.
• Proven system design at production scale: service boundaries, data flow, consistency, failure modes, and the ability to defend those choices with trade-offs, not slides.
• Deep, hands-on Java, plus Go and/or Python where they fit the problem.
• TypeScript, React, and Next.js, enough to shape and contribute to the web application.
• Microsoft Azure in production, API and integration design, and distributed systems (queues, events, idempotency, consistency, resilience, and fault tolerance).
• Strong SQL, data modeling, and query optimization, plus NoSQL, caching, and search — with a track record of making data-heavy UIs and APIs fast (latency, throughput, pagination, aggregation, cache strategy).
• Automated testing, CI/CD, containers, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, and production diagnosis with logs, metrics, and traces.
• Plus: Analytics or BI products, conversational interfaces, multi-tenant systems, Domain-Driven Design, feature flags, and progressive delivery.

More about you:

• You combine architectural judgment with implementation and stay close to the code. You treat system design and performance as first-class product work, not afterthoughts.
• You make pragmatic trade-offs and choose the simpler design when it is enough — and you do not ship a design that cannot meet its performance envelope.
• You explain risks, decisions, and limits clearly to technical and business audiences. You raise the team’s quality through example, review, and collaboration, including when requirements are incomplete.