Principal Engineer

Requirements:

• Principal-grade depth: typically 8+ years shipping and operating production systems, with the scar tissue to prove it.
• Genuine polyglot fluency. Production work in at least four of: PHP (Laravel), TypeScript, Python, Go, Rust, Lua. You pick up a new language over a weekend, and it shows in code review on Monday.
• Deep Linux and infrastructure chops. Kubernetes (EKS) and container internals, Docker Swarm realities, HAProxy/OpenResty, Cloudflare Zero Trust, and the ability to debug from strace all the way up to Grafana dashboards.
• PostgreSQL beyond CRUD. Replication topologies, connection pooling behaviour, lock contention, and what actually happens under load.
• A security instinct. OWASP is table stakes. You can reason about mTLS, token binding, IDOR/BOLA, key custody, and crucially what an RBI or SOC 2 auditor will ask about your design.
• An AI-native workflow. You already use agentic coding tools daily, know precisely where they break, and can teach others to get leverage without losing rigour.
• Sharp technical writing. RFCs, decision memos, postmortems. Half this job is making hard decisions legible to engineers, auditors, and the board.
• Ownership under ambiguity. You can be handed a question, not a ticket, and return with the answer, the fix, and the prevention.