Principal Engineer (Data and Infra)

About Exotel

Exotel is one of Asia's largest and most trusted customer engagement platforms. From Voice and SMS to WhatsApp and AI-led contact centre intelligence, Exotel enables enterprises to deliver secure, scalable, and seamless customer conversations. Trusted by thousands of businesses across BFSI, Logistics, E-commerce, Healthcare, and more, Exotel processes billions of interactions every year.

Our mission is to power meaningful conversations through robust engineering, customer-centric design, and intelligent automation.

Platform Engineering @ Exotel

The Platform Engineering team builds and operates the core distributed systems and data infrastructure that power Exotel's products. The team focuses on reliability, scalability, performance, and security, abstracting complex infrastructure and data challenges to enable faster innovation across product teams.

Role Overview

As a Platform Engineer - PE-1 (Data & Infrastructure), you will be responsible for designing, building, and operating scalable data systems and infrastructure components that support Exotel's high-throughput, low-latency platforms. This is a hands-on individual contributor role with strong ownership, where you will work closely with senior engineers and tech leads on distributed systems, data pipelines, and platform reliability.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain scalable data infrastructure including data pipelines, storage systems, and data access layers.

• Build and operate distributed systems that ensure high availability, fault tolerance, and low latency.

• Work with databases and messaging systems to support real-time and batch workloads.

• Collaborate with product and engineering teams on data modelling, system design, and performance optimisation.

• Implement monitoring, alerting, and logging to ensure platform reliability and SLA adherence.

• Troubleshoot and resolve production issues across data and infrastructure layers.

• Contribute to CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, and infrastructure improvements.

• Participate in design reviews, code reviews, and on-call rotations.

• Continuously improve system scalability, security, and cost efficiency.

Must-Have Qualifications

• 6-9 years of hands-on experience in backend, data, or platform engineering roles.

• Strong experience building and operating data systems such as:

• Data pipelines

• Data APIs

• Reporting or analytics frameworks

• Experience with distributed databases and data stores such as MySQL, Redis, Elasticsearch, Aerospike, or similar systems.

• Working knowledge of messaging and streaming systems (e.g., Kafka or equivalent).

• Proficiency in at least one systems programming language such as Java or Go.

• Experience deploying and operating services on Kubernetes (EKS preferred).

• Familiarity with observability and DevOps tooling such as Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Jenkins.

• Strong understanding of computer science fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, and distributed systems concepts.

• Ownership mindset with a strong focus on production quality and reliability.

Good-to-Have Qualifications

• Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.

• Exposure to Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible, etc.).

• Experience operating production-scale distributed systems.

• Familiarity with AI/ML data pipelines or real-time analytics systems.

• Exposure to serverless technologies or workflow/orchestration engines.

• Understanding of cost optimisation and capacity planning in cloud environments.