Principal Engineer

Overview of the Role

As the Principal Engineer for our Campaign Platform, you will act as the technical authority driving architectural excellence, scalability, and operational reliability across our distributed systems and services. You’ll lead backend technical direction and collaborate closely with Team Lead, Software Engineers, Solution Architects, and QA to ensure our systems are secure, efficient, and resilient at scale.

What you'll do:

Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Architect and Evolve Systems: Own the backend architecture vision across multiple services and domains. Design systems optimized for performance, observability, and scalability, ensuring they meet multi-market and multi-product requirements.
• Technical Direction: Guide the evolution of our microservice and monolithic components, ensuring maintainability, performance, and clear service boundaries.
• Problem Solving: Lead complex technical investigations, propose long-term solutions, and ensure alignment with architectural principles defined at the Tribe/Engineering level.
• Code Quality & Standards: Define backend coding standards and enforce best practices in Node.js (NestJS) and related backend frameworks. Promote reliability through code reviews, automation, and CI/CD pipelines.

Collaboration & Delivery

• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with Product Owners, QA, DevOps, and other teams to define interfaces, data flows, and integration strategies that ensure seamless delivery.
• Release Management: Support release activities by ensuring production readiness, performance validation, and rollback strategies are in place.
• System Governance: Represent backend engineering decisions and dependencies in cross-tribe and company-wide architecture discussions.

Mentorship & Knowledge Sharing

• Engineer Development: Mentor backend developers, fostering technical excellence, ownership, and growth across the team.
• Best Practices: Champion backend engineering best practices in API design, data modeling, observability, and scalability.
• Innovation: Encourage experimentation with new backend technologies, patterns, and cloud-native solutions that improve delivery and reliability.

Quality, Reliability & Automation

• Test Strategy Collaboration: Work closely with QA and DevOps to ensure strong test automation coverage across unit, integration, and load testing layers.
• Operational Excellence: Partner with SREs to ensure robust monitoring, alerting, and incident management processes are in place.
• Quality Mindset: Promote a “build it right” culture—prioritizing security, performance, and long-term maintainability over short-term fixes.

Core Technologies

• Node.js (NestJS) and TypeScript-based backend development
• RESTful APIs and microservices
• Message queues (Kafka)
• PostgreSQL, Redis, and other persistence layers
• CI/CD pipelines, containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and cloud platforms

What you’ll bring:

• 5+ years of experience in backend and full-stack web application development, with at least 2+ years in a senior or lead role.

• 1+ years of experience in a leadership or mentoring role (e.g., Tech Lead, Senior Software Engineer guiding a sub-team), with demonstrated ability to coach and support technical team members; direct line management experience is a plus.

• Proven hands-on experience with Node.js and NestJS (TypeScript) for building scalable, maintainable backend systems.

• Familiarity with PHP/Laravel and Node.js API development, particularly in microservice or CMS-based projects.

• Solid understanding of web application architecture, including RESTful API design, microservices patterns, and database modeling (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis).

• Experience with message queues and asynchronous processing (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ).

• Knowledge of CI/CD pipelines, containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and cloud platforms (AWS preferred).

• Strong grasp of code quality, testing strategies, and security best practices for backend services.

• Excellent collaboration and communication skills, with experience working in cross-functional teams (Product, QA, DevOps).