{"id":3801171,"url":"https://alion.io/job/encord-principal-engineer-backend-2","title":"Principal Engineer, Backend","company":{"id":557,"name":"Encord","domain":"encord.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/encord","size_band":"201-500","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":null},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["London, United Kingdom"],"countries":["GB"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Databricks","optional":false},{"name":"ElevenLabs","optional":false},{"name":"Vercel","optional":false},{"name":"CUDA","optional":true},{"name":"GCP","optional":true},{"name":"JavaScript","optional":true},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":true},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":true},{"name":"Python","optional":true},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":true},{"name":"Ray","optional":true},{"name":"React.js","optional":true},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-08-10T15:57:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-08-10","last_verified_at":"2026-11-09T06:15:01Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":90,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":90},"description":"About us\nWe're solving AI's hardest problem: alignment.\nEncord is the data layer for Physical AI and enterprise, serving as core infrastructure for 300+ of the world's leading AI teams, including Woven by Toyota, Hitachi, Skydio, AbbVie and Dyna, Walden and Agility Robotics. From autonomous vehicles and robotics to sports and healthcare, we're solving AI's hardest problem: turning complex, real-world data into production-ready intelligent systems.\nWe're a team of founders, scientists, quants, researchers, and former Olympians, who’ve helped build some of the most successful companies in Silicon Valley, and alumni of MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Oxford, Cambridge, and Imperial. We’ve raised $110M from legendary technology investors, early backers of companies like Databricks, ElevenLabs and Vercel, and we’re growing at an extraordinary pace.\nWe're looking for exceptional people who want to help build a category-defining company, operating with high urgency and taking real ownership to help shape the future of AI.\nThe role\nWe're looking for a Principal Engineer to join our Foundations team, the backend backbone that builds the reliable, scalable, fast systems everyone else at Encord builds on top of. The team's core challenges sit deep in distributed and data intensive systems.\nThe product mindset on this team is different from most of the company: short-term product insight matters less, long-term matters a lot. Our Foundations team plans around how the next 6, 12, and 24 months will look, with an overarching shape to the problem: handling multiple orders of magnitude the data we handle today. This is our most senior individual contributor role. You'll own the hardest architectural calls, make the trade-offs that shape the platform for years, and raise the engineering bar across the company.\nEncord is growing rapidly, with our product as the key driver of that growth. A year ago, we were a team of 100, now, we're over 150 and continuing to accelerate. The systems that got us here won't get us to what's next. That's the problem you'll own.\nWhat you'll do\nDesign and lead major database and processing-system initiatives\n\nDesign performant protocols and APIs, such as our label-format API, that customers use directly. This work sits across both product and engineering\n\nBuild robust distributed systems and reason rigorously about how they fail and how they behave under load\n\nLevel up engineers across the company through design reviews, pairing, and mentorship, without adding process for its own sake\n\nWho we're looking for\nYou've seen and built more than most. You've personally designed, built, and operated large-scale distributed systems in production, and you've lived with your architectural decisions long enough to know which trade-offs actually matter\n\nYour impact shows up in the output of the engineers around you, not just your own commits. You make hard things look simple and teach others to do the same\n\nYou want your work to have a tangible outcome for people. You're not satisfied with building products that do not see the light of day\n\nYou are a builder. You enjoy all aspects of building not only software but a complete product, and are comfortable moving across the stack when necessary\n\nYou enjoy problem-solving and thinking from first principles, reach for the simplest solution that works, and know when boring technology wins\n\nYou're happy to own problems without a predefined, clear definition or obvious solution, and are excited to have autonomy to make decisions as you go\n\nYou understand that being a member of a high-performing team requires two things. You contribute your best work and help others contribute their best. You'll always lend a helping hand when needed and level up those around you\n\nExperience requirements\n10+ years building large-scale backend infrastructure applications, including several years operating at staff/principal level with company-wide technical influence\n\nDeep expertise in distributed systems (databases, processing systems, replication, partitioning, queuing, caching) and a rigorous understanding of how they fail and behave under load at scale\n\nExperience leading large-scale data migrations and system-splitting or re-architecture projects with real customer data on the line\n\nExperience owning reliability and operations in production, including monitoring, alerting, and DevOps/SRE\n\nA track record of raising engineering quality across teams through architecture reviews, code reviews, testing, rollout, and monitoring practices\n\nDemonstrated ability to influence without authority, driving technical alignment across teams in a fast-moving, low-process environment\n\nTech stack\nWe are technology-agnostic at Encord and are not looking for experience across all of these. As long as you're open to learning, please apply.\nBackend: Python\n\nFrontend: TypeScript and React\n\nDeployment: Kubernetes\n\nInfrastructure: GCP\n\nMachine learning: PyTorch, CUDA, Ray\n\nWhy Encord\nCompetitive salary, commission, and meaningful equity in a high-growth startup\n\nClear, accelerated growth opportunities as the company scales rapidly\n\nStrong in-person culture: 4 days/week\n\nDaily team lunches & dinners\n\nAnnual learning & development budget\n\nComprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage\n\nUS employees: 18 paid vacation days plus US public holidays\n\nUK employees: 25 paid vacation days plus UK public holidays\n\nFrequent travel opportunities across the U.S., London, and Europe\n\nBi-annual company offsites & monthly socials\n\nOperating principles\nHigh agency\nYou see something broken, you fix it or find the person who can. We celebrate the people who solve 90% of a problem before anyone asks.\nBuild with care & urgency\nWe bear-hug the customer. Former founders and people from fast-moving, high-stakes environments thrive here.\nSelf-aware & hungry\nWe stay warm, self-aware, and genuinely hungry. We elevate our peers, and ego doesn't last long.\nInvent in real time\nWe move toward the ambiguity. We’re pragmatic, resourceful, energized by the fact that there's no playbook.\nIf you're looking to do the most meaningful work of your career alongside people who push you to be better, we'd love to meet you.","description_format":"text","description_chars":6197,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity","Growth opportunities"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["MLOps","AI Training Data & Annotation"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-11-05T11:32:21Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":33,"band":"fade","label":"Fading","p_open":1,"p_active":0.741,"p_room":0.44,"age_days":90,"expected_fill_days":69,"reasons":["conf:4","velocity","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-11-09T06:03:00Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/encord-principal-engineer-backend-2","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/encord-principal-engineer-backend-2.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-09T08:28:44Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":6866,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-10T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":557},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=557"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fencord-principal-engineer-backend-2"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":2,"usd":0.2},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fencord-principal-engineer-backend-2"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fencord-principal-engineer-backend-2"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/encord-principal-engineer-backend-2\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fencord-principal-engineer-backend-2"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":3801171}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"encord.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":3801171},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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