Principal Engineer - Backend

What you'll own

• Architectural direction for the backend platform. API contract governance, service boundary design, data architecture, scaling and reliability strategy. Your decisions outlive your tenure.
• Canonical engineering standards. Author the system design principles, code review norms, testing standards, deployment guidelines, and post-mortem culture that the team operates within.
• Multi-quarter cross-team architectural initiatives that span 2+ services and 2+ engineers. You define the scope, sequence the work, and follow through to production and post-launch outcomes.
• System stewardship at scale. Identify refactor candidates, drive debt management, set the modernisation roadmap. When a system in your stewardship area breaks, you drive the response from incident through post-mortem through prevention.
• Mentoring across the engineering ladder, from junior through Staff. You own the technical growth trajectory of backend engineers. Their progression is traceable to your guidance.
• Hands-on craft on the hardest problems. You still ship code at exemplary craft level. Code reviews set the discipline's craft ceiling.
• Hiring contribution for senior engineering. You shape the technical interview rubric and contribute to senior-level hiring decisions.
• Peer-level partnership wi