Principal Software Engineer

We are seeking a hands-on Staff Engineer to drive technical excellence and own the technology roadmap for key OTA services. In this role, you will be responsible for designing and operating highly available, scalable systems, mentoring developers, and collaborating closely with engineering leadership. You will help shape team culture, make architectural trade-offs with confidence, and solve complex problems under tight deadlines

The candidate will have responsibilities across the following functions:

Technical Leadership:

• Provide architectural oversight and review designs for services, APIs, and data flows.
• Make informed trade-offs between performance, reliability, and speed to market.
• Define and enforce coding standards, design patterns, and best practices.
• Mentor engineers on system design, code quality, and operational excellence.

System Design and Development:

• Design and implement robust, scalable, and secure backend services (Java, Spring Boot, or similar).
• Ensure services meet high availability, fault tolerance, and low-latency requirements.
• Troubleshoot production issues, conduct root cause analysis, and drive continuous improvements.
• Own end-to-end delivery: from requirements gathering to deployment, monitoring, and support.

Collaboration and Roadmap Ownership:

• Work closely with Product, DevOps, QA, and other stakeholders to align on priorities and delivery timelines.
• Translate business requirements into technical solutions and present them to nontechnical audiences.
• Own the team's technology roadmap: evaluate new tools, platforms, and architectural patterns.
• Foster a culture of experimentation, documentation, and knowledge sharing.

Operational Excellence:

• Collaborate with SRE/DevOps to establish effective monitoring, alerting, and DevSecOps strategies.
• Ensure services adhere to security, compliance, and data-privacy standards.
• Drive capacity planning, performance tuning, and cost-optimisation initiatives.

Requirements:

• Deep coding, system design, and architecture expertise.
• Cross-functional system knowledge for resilience, availability, and scale.
• Confident in architectural and design trade-offs.
• Strong debugging and problem-solving skills.
• Ability to own and evolve the team's technical roadmap.
• Proficiency in AI-driven tools and processes to boost developer productivity and automation.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.
• 12+ years of backend development experience, with at least 3years in a leadership or senior architect role.
• Expert in Java (Spring Boot) or equivalent backend stacks (Nodejs, Go, Python, etc. )
• Proven track record of designing and operating microservices at scale (REST APIs, event-driven architectures.