Role: Principal Engineer – Product Engineering
Location: Chennai
Role Description:
CAMS builds regulated financial technology products — retirement, alternative investments, compliance surveillance and document intelligence — for pension funds, registrars, bank operations and distributors. All products are composed on one proprietary platform, a multi engine runtime that deploys identically into a client data centre or as SaaS. This role owns that platform. Final technical authority on its architecture, hands-on in the code, and accountable for what ships to clients operating under SEBI, PFRDA and RBI supervision. Leads a team of engineers across development, QA and DevOps.
Responsibilities:
- Own the platform architecture end to end — engine boundaries, runtime contracts, deployment topology, and the composition model that lets a new product be assembled rather than rebuilt.
- Act as final technical authority on design decisions, technology selection and build-versus-buy.
- Stay hands-on in the code — write it, review it, and carry the problems no one else can.
- Own the release train across concurrent product lines against contractual client SLAs.
- Own production — uptime, incident response, root-cause discipline, DR posture and drills.
- Scale systems in production as client volumes grow — capacity planning, performance tuning and infrastructure cost.
- Maintain parity between on-premise and SaaS deployment from a single artifact.
- Set and enforce engineering standards — review discipline, test coverage, defect escape rate, observability.
- Apply AI-assisted code generation where it earns its place, and debug what it produces before it reaches production.
- Debug across the stack — from an application defect to a database, network or infrastructure fault — and find root cause quickly under client pressure.
- Ensure audit evidence, access control and data-protection posture withstand regulator and client scrutiny, including DPDP obligations.
- Lead technical sections of RFPs, client architecture reviews, security questionnaires and third-party audits.
- Mentor engineers — raise the technical level of the team, not only its output.
- Scale the team — hiring, onboarding, performance and retention as the portfolio grows.
- Work proactively — surface risks, gaps and opportunities before being asked, and act on them without waiting for direction.
Required:
- 8 – 12+ years in software engineering, of which 1 – 3+ leading engineers directly, and still writing code today.
- Has owned a multi-tenant platform in production — real service boundaries, shared authentication, audit and data layers, configuration-driven behaviour. Not a portfolio of separate applications.
- Has scaled a production system through a significant increase in load, and can show what was measured and what was changed.
- Hands-on: Node.js / NestJS, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Oracle or MSSQL, NGINX, Kubernetes, Azure / AWS / GCP, NATS or equivalent messaging, CI/CD and observability tooling.
- Takes over an existing opinionated codebase and improves it incrementally, rather than proposing a rewrite before understanding why a boundary exists.
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related discipline.
Preferred:
- Has delivered into Indian financial services under audit, uptime and compliance obligations — registrar and transfer agency, depository, pension, account aggregator, wealth, capital markets or comparable.
- Has shipped the same product both into a client data centre and as SaaS.
- Has built a platform that other teams then built products on.
- Direct experience of a client security audit, ISO 27001, SOC 2, or a regulator-facing technology review.
- AI-assisted code generation inside a governed pipeline, with a human review gate before production.
- Exposure to mutual funds, NPS and retirement, AIF/PMS, or surveillance and compliance domains.
