Principal Software Engineer - Data Backend

This role is for one of Weekday’s clients

Min Experience: 12+ years
Location: India
JobType: full-time

We are seeking a highly experienced Principal Software Engineer – Data Backend to drive technical excellence across data-intensive backend systems. This is a highly hands-on Individual Contributor role focused on architecture, distributed systems, scalability, performance, and production-grade software engineering.

The ideal candidate will bring deep software engineering expertise to complex data systems, helping shape technical direction, lead high-impact engineering initiatives, mentor senior engineers, and remain closely involved in system design, coding, performance optimization, and production operations.

This is not a conventional data engineering or people-management role. The position is suited for a technical leader who can influence architecture across multiple teams while continuing to build and operate critical systems.

• Own the architecture and delivery of major data-intensive backend products or platform initiatives.
• Design and build scalable systems across areas such as batch and stream processing, data ingestion, orchestration, semantic systems, ontology layers, analytics, query processing, and data products.
• Drive system design decisions focused on scalability, reliability, maintainability, observability, performance, and data quality.
• Remain deeply hands-on with critical code, technical designs, architecture reviews, and production systems.
• Establish and uphold engineering standards for code quality, testing, operability, reliability, and system design.
• Identify and implement performance and cost optimizations across distributed compute, storage, querying, and data-serving layers.
• Provide technical direction across multiple engineering teams while remaining actively involved in implementation and delivery.
• Lead organization-wide or cross-functional technical initiatives from strategy and design through execution.
• Mentor senior and staff-level engineers and help strengthen engineering practices, technical judgment, and system-design capabilities across the organization.
• Drive cross-team technical alignment and resolve complex architectural and engineering challenges.
• Evaluate technology choices and architectural trade-offs for high-scale data and backend systems.
• Contribute to improving system observability, reliability, operational maturity, and production readiness.
• Continuously identify opportunities to improve engineering efficiency, system performance, and long-term maintainability.

• Typically 12–17 years of software engineering experience, with sustained Staff+ or Principal-level technical scope.
• Proven experience building high-scale, data-intensive software products or distributed systems from the ground up and operating them in production.
• Exceptional coding ability with strong standards for code quality, testing, reliability, operability, and maintainability.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems, backend architecture, data systems, and performance engineering.
• Strong understanding of scalability, fault tolerance, distributed computation, storage, querying, and system performance trade-offs.
• Demonstrated ability to lead large technical initiatives spanning multiple teams without relying on formal management authority.
• Ability to influence technical strategy and architecture while remaining deeply involved in implementation.
• Strong mentoring capabilities with a track record of raising the technical bar for senior engineers.
• Experience working with open-source technologies and building systems around open-source components is strongly preferred.
• Strong understanding of software engineering principles beyond simply assembling managed cloud services.

Candidates with experience building or scaling the following types of systems are particularly relevant:

• Distributed query or analytics engines
• Large-scale batch or stream processing systems
• Data-intensive backend platforms
• Data products and serving systems
• High-performance ingestion infrastructure
• Semantic or ontology platforms
• Distributed storage and compute systems
• Performance-oriented data processing systems
• Open-source distributed systems and infrastructure

Exact technology keywords are less important than demonstrated depth in engineering judgment, architecture, coding, scalability, and ownership.

We are looking for a Principal-level software engineer who continues to code and build. The ideal candidate combines architectural depth with exceptional implementation skills and can move comfortably between high-level technical strategy and low-level engineering details.

You should be capable of taking ownership of ambiguous, technically complex problems, influencing multiple engineering teams, and delivering systems that operate reliably at scale.

• Primarily CRUD or conventional SaaS backend development
• Traditional ETL, BI, or reporting-focused data engineering
• Data engineering limited primarily to assembling managed services
• Platform operations roles without significant software engineering depth
• Candidates with narrow expertise in individual technologies without broader systems knowledge
• Pure architecture roles where hands-on coding is no longer part of the day-to-day work
• Engineering management positions without continued technical ownership

• Exceptional software engineering and coding ability
• Strong distributed systems expertise
• Deep system design and architecture capabilities
• Performance and cost optimization
• Technical leadership and cross-team influence
• Production engineering and operational excellence
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills
• Mentoring and technical development of senior engineers
• High ownership and engineering judgment

• Distributed Systems
• Software Architecture
• Backend Engineering

• Apache Kafka
• Query Optimization
• Open Source