Principal Engineer

About Exotel

Exotel is the emerging market's leading full-stack customer engagement platform and business-focused virtual telecom operator. Incorporated in 2011, Exotel's cloud-based product suite powers 50 million daily engagements across voice, video and messaging channels. Exotel powers unified customer engagement to over 6000 companies in 60+ countries, including India, SE Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.

Today, some of the fastest-growing companies in the emerging markets (Ola, Swiggy, Flipkart, GoJek, Urban Company, HDFC Bank, Zomato, Oyo, etc.) manage their customer engagement with Exotel's suite of communication APIs, Ameyo's omnichannel contact centre (merger), and Cogno AI's conversational AI platform (acquisition) over the cloud. We are a $100 million Series D funded company with $60 million in ARR.

The Role

We are seeking a seasoned and visionary Senior Principal Engineer to join our core Financial Engineering (FinOps): Demonstrated expertise in monitoring and optimizing cloud infrastructure costs (AWS/Azure/GCP) at a massive scale, encompassing cost attribution, budgeting, and the ability to make strategic architectural decisions that balance high performance and reliability with financial efficiency.

Responsibilities

• Product Design and Architecture:
• Lead the design and architecture of our multi-tenant, highly available, and scalable Enterprise Contact Center platform.
• Define the technical vision and long-term architectural roadmap, ensuring alignment with business goals and industry best practices.
• Architect and design core components, including but not limited to, omnichannel routing (voice, email, chat, social), Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems, outbound dialers, and real-time and historical reporting and analytics.
• Drive the evolution of our platform to incorporate emerging technologies such as AI/ML for intelligent routing, sentiment analysis, and workforce optimization.
• Technical Influence and Evangelism:
• Champion and evangelize modern software development methodologies, including Agile, and foster a culture of engineering excellence, innovation, and accountability.
• Mentor and provide technical guidance to senior and junior engineers, fostering their growth and ensuring high-quality design and implementation.
• Collaborate with product management, engineering teams, and other stakeholders to translate product requirements into robust and scalable technical solutions.
• Act as a subject matter expert on contact center technologies, representing the company at industry forums, and with key customers and partners.
• Reliability and Accountability:
• Take ultimate accountability for the reliability, performance, and scalability of the Enterprise Contact Center product.
• Establish and enforce service level objectives (SLOs) and service level indicators (SLIs) for the platform.
• Proactively identify and mitigate technical risks, and lead the resolution of complex production issues.
• Drive a culture of operational excellence and continuous improvement, leveraging data and feedback to enhance system performance.
• Performance Engineering and Stress Testing:
• Hands-on experience with benchmarking, load testing, and performance tuning large-scale systems, identifying bottlenecks at the OS, network, and application layers beyond general reliability metrics

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
• 12+ years of experience in software engineering, with at least 5 years in a senior architect or principal engineer role for an enterprise-grade product.
• Proven expertise in System Design and Architecture:
• Demonstrated experience in designing and building large-scale, distributed, and highly available systems.
• Strong understanding of microservices architecture, domain-driven design, and event-driven architectures.
• Experience with public cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP) and containerization technologies (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes).