Principal Engineer - Onsite - JHB

ENVIRONMENT:

A cutting-edge AgriTech is seeking a visionary and hands-on Principal Engineer to serve as the lead technical authority across their engineering department. In this high-impact role, you will bridge the gap between business strategy and deep technical execution, defining cross-cutting architecture, driving technical governance, and setting engineering standards across all teams. You will tackle their most complex distributed systems challenges, research emerging technologies, and mentor senior talent, ensuring their software architecture scales securely and efficiently alongside their rapid global growth.

DUTIES:

• Technical Strategy & System Architecture: Translate technical vision into a concrete architectural roadmap and engineering standards for their multi-tenant AgTech platform, owning execution across domain teams.
• Complex Problem Solving: Own the resolution of high-stakes technical challenges, performance bottlenecks, scale limits, and critical cross-system integration points.
• Cross-Team Governance: Guide and align architecture across multiple domain teams (e.g., Data, Core SaaS, Integrations), ensuring consistent patterns, data models, and API designs.
• Technology Evaluation & R&D: Conduct deep-dive research into emerging tech, tools, and paradigms, running proof-of-concepts to determine feasibility for system modernization.
• Quality & Engineering Standards: Drive engineering excellence by defining best practices for testing, CI/CD pipelines, system monitoring, security, and developer productivity.
• Technical Leadership & Mentorship: Elevate the overall engineering bar by mentoring Senior and Staff Engineers, conducting high-impact architectural reviews, and running technical knowledge-sharing workshops.
• Strategic Product Alignment: Partner closely with executive leadership and product managers to translate long-term strategic goals into feasible, scalable engineering solutions.

• Preferred: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or equivalent practical experience.

• Seniority: 10+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3+ years in a Staff, Lead, or Principal Architect capacity driving systems design for complex, high-scale applications.
• Track Record: Proven history of leading end-to-end migrations, designing multi-tenant enterprise applications, or re-architecting systems for massive scale.
• Leadership Experience: Experience mentoring senior-level engineers and interfacing directly with executive tech leadership (CTO/VP of Engineering).
• Advantageous: Direct experience leading platform or architectural transformations (e.g., monolith decomposition, legacy modernisation, domain-driven re-architecture) in a live production system.

• Distributed Systems Architecture: Deep expertise designing and evolving large-scale, multi-tenant system architectures, with sound judgement on architectural trade-offs (e.g., modular decomposition, service boundaries, synchronous vs. event-driven communication) appropriate to the business and team context.
• Cloud & DevOps: Working knowledge of cloud architecture (AWS) and infrastructure-as-code/container orchestration/CI-CD practices, sufficient to partner effectively with the DevOps function that owns implementation.
• Production Database Ownership: Deep expertise operating, scaling, and evolving relational production databases (e.g., PostgreSQL or equivalent) — schema design, sharding, replication, caching, and query optimisation — with direct ownership of the application's OLTP database(s). Partners with the Data team on integration with the analytics warehouse and streaming pipelines, without owning them.
• API Design & Integration: Mastery of GraphQL, REST, and event brokers (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ) for cross-service communication.
• Security & Compliance: Strong knowledge of zero-trust architecture, data encryption, identity management, and data privacy frameworks (e.g., GDPR, POPIA).:
• Architectural Vision: Ability to design long-term system architecture that balances business velocity, operational cost, and technical debt reduction.
• Technical Influence: Proven capability to align disparate technical teams, guide senior developers, and build consensus around complex architectural decisions.
• Strategic Thinking: Ability to map business strategy into scalable, resilient technical initiatives.
• Root-Cause Analysis: High-level mastery of debugging, profiling, and resolving complex, intermittent systemic failures across multi-layered platforms.
• Communication & Stakeholder Management: Translates highly technical concepts into clear, actionable insights for non-technical executives and product leads.
• Polyglot Engineering: Advanced proficiency in modern systems/web programming languages (e.g., Python, Ruby, TypeScript, Go, or Java/Scala) with the ability to ramp up quickly on any stack.
• Database & Query Optimisation: Advanced database tuning, query optimisation, and schema migration strategies for continuous uptime.
• System Design & Modeling: Advanced capabilities in designing resilient distributed pipelines, high-availability APIs, and scalable network architectures.
• Mentorship & Governance: Strong track record of establishing code review guidelines, conducting architecture reviews, and fostering an inclusive, high-performing engineering culture.

Desired Skills:

• Principal
• Engineer
• Onsite