Principal Engineer
This opportunity is with one of our clients, a mission-driven global EdTech innovator building large-scale learning platforms used by millions of students and educators worldwide.
Location: Bengaluru Hybrid (3 days WFO)
Experience: 1218 years
Role: Principal Engineer (Technical Leadership & Architecture)
About the Role
We are seeking a highly skilled Principal Engineer who will serve as the technical owner and architect for a core product domain. The ideal candidate will excel in designing scalable systems, driving modernization initiatives, improving platform reliability, and mentoring engineering teams. This role requires deep technical expertise, strong architectural judgment, and the ability to influence cross-functional stakeholders across product, engineering, and platform teams.
Key Responsibilities
Technical Leadership & Architecture
- Own end-to-end architectural strategy and long-term technical roadmap for the domain.
- Design scalable, secure, and reliable systems powering student and educator workflows.
- Maintain clear architectural documentation and drive adherence to engineering standards across teams.
Execution & Engineering Excellence
- Lead development of Java/Spring Boot microservices; contribute to ReactJS integrations as needed.
- Ensure high-quality coding practices, testing discipline, and clean interface design.
- Drive platform modernization, performance enhancements, and structured refactoring.
Cross-Team Collaboration
- Lead multi-team integrations and align data contracts, interfaces, and ownership boundaries.
- Influence engineers, Product Managers, Engineering Managers, and partner teams without formal authority.
- Advocate for reusable patterns and prevent siloed architectural decisions.
Operational Ownership
- Own system reliability, uptime, scalability, and on-call readiness.
- Lead incident analysis and drive long-term fixes to prevent recurrence.
- Define and measure SLIs/SLOs; ensure secure design and cloud cost efficiency.
Mentorship & Technical Growth
- Mentor engineers across levels in system design, debugging, and architectural thinking.
- Partner with Engineering Managers on technical quality, predictability, and team development.
- Contribute to internal technical forums and engineering communities.
Required Qualifications
Technical Expertise
- 1218 years of experience building large-scale backend or full-stack platforms.
- Deep expertise in Java, Spring Boot, distributed systems, microservices, APIs.
- Working knowledge of ReactJS and frontend integration patterns.
- Strong debugging skills in complex distributed production environments.
- Solid understanding of databases, caching, queues, CI/CD, containers, and observability.
Architecture & Leadership
- Demonstrated ability to design high-scale, mission-critical systems.
- Proven track record of influencing multiple engineering teams and making strong architectural decisions.
- Experience elevating engineering standards and mentoring senior engineers.
Operational & Cloud Experience
- Hands-on experience owning production systems, SLIs/SLOs, incident response, and performance tuning.
- Familiarity with AWS or Azure ecosystems.
- Strong grounding in secure development practices and data privacy.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with PHP/LAMP stack.
- Background in EdTech or large-scale learning platforms.
- Exposure to ML/AI-driven personalization workflows.
Education
Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience.
