Staff Engineer/Principal Engineer
First seen by Alion on Sep 3, 2026.
About the Role :
We're hiring Staff and Principal-level backend engineers to own architecture end-to-end across our core platform. This is a high-ownership individual contributor role - you will make real architectural decisions, not just implement someone else's design. We're building agentic systems that operate on complex, high-stakes financial data at scale, and we need engineers who've done serious distributed-systems work before and want to keep doing it.
What You'll Do :
- Own the architecture of core platform systems end-to-end - from design through production.
- Work on complex distributed systems problems : scale, consistency, reliability, and real-time processing of financial data.
- Drive 0 - 1 builds - new services, new subsystems, or first-of-their-kind capabilities on the platform.
- Partner directly with product and the CTO on technical direction, not just execution.
- Where relevant, build or extend agentic/AI-assisted systems as part of the core product.
What We're Looking For :
- A strong individual contributor who can own architecture end-to-end - not just execute a spec.
- No domain requirement. We care about engineering fundamentals more than prior industry experience.
- Agentic system-building experience is a plus, but not required.
- A real background in complex distributed systems - you should be able to speak concretely about scale, trade-offs, and failure modes you've dealt with.
- Either startup experience doing 0 - 1 work, or a clear desire to work at that scale - having driven a 0 - 1 build inside a larger company counts just as positively.
- No pedigree requirement - IIT background is not required. We evaluate on the strength and complexity of what you've actually built.
Skills
Backend Architecture, Distributed Systems, System Architecture