{"id":2696950,"url":"https://alion.io/job/sage-principal-engineer-backend","title":"Principal Engineer (backend)","company":{"id":8779,"name":"Sage","domain":"sage.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/sage","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Sage Careers","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":83,"open_postings":8,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.5,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":69,"computed_at":"2026-10-16T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"lead","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"explicit","locations":["Bengaluru, India"],"countries":["IN"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":24000,"max_usd":55000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":57},"experience_years_min":10,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Amazon S3","optional":false},{"name":"Anthropic","optional":false},{"name":"Apache Kafka","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"AWS Bedrock","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Claude Code","optional":false},{"name":"Copilot","optional":false},{"name":"Cursor","optional":false},{"name":"Docker","optional":false},{"name":"Embeddings","optional":false},{"name":"ESLint","optional":false},{"name":"Fastify","optional":false},{"name":"Git","optional":false},{"name":"GitHub Actions","optional":false},{"name":"IAM","optional":false},{"name":"Jest","optional":false},{"name":"Knex.js","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"MySQL","optional":false},{"name":"Nest.JS","optional":false},{"name":"Node JS","optional":false},{"name":"OpenAI","optional":false},{"name":"OWASP Top 10","optional":false},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":false},{"name":"Prettier","optional":false},{"name":"RabbitMQ","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"Redis","optional":false},{"name":"Rest API","optional":false},{"name":"SQL","optional":false},{"name":"Swagger","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false},{"name":"Vitest","optional":false},{"name":"Anomaly Detection","optional":true},{"name":"ArgoCD","optional":true},{"name":"Flyway","optional":true},{"name":"GitOps","optional":true},{"name":"Istio","optional":true},{"name":"Java","optional":true},{"name":"JavaScript","optional":true},{"name":"KEDA","optional":true},{"name":"Liquibase","optional":true},{"name":"New Relic","optional":true},{"name":"Pino","optional":true},{"name":"Prometheus","optional":true},{"name":"Service Mesh","optional":true},{"name":"Sumo Logic","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-16T10:23:04Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-16","last_verified_at":"2026-10-16T19:05:43Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":0,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":0},"description":"About the RoleAs a Principal Backend Engineer at Sage, you will provide technical leadership in designing, developing, and delivering a high-quality SaaS solution that exceeds customer and business partner expectations. We are looking for someone with 10+ years of professional experience in backend engineering, who can bring technical depth, architectural vision, and leadership maturity to the team. Proficiency in English, written and verbal, is required.\nWe value humility and collaboration. We are looking for people who can work as part of a team, not in silos. We expect engineers to take ownership beyond just writing code, including tests, documentation, and long-term code quality.\nLocation: Bangalore, India. This is a hybrid role, three days per week in the office.\nRequired Skills\nCore languages & runtime\nStrong TypeScript (strict mode) and Node.js (v24+) for production services.\nSolid computer-science fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, concurrency, async I/O.\nBackend frameworks & APIs\nREST API design with Fastify (or Express/NestJS/Koa with willingness to learn Fastify).\nJSON Schema contract design and validation (AJV or equivalent); OpenAPI/Swagger.\nUnderstanding of API versioning, idempotency, pagination, and error-handling patterns.\nData & persistence\nRelational databases MySQL and/or PostgreSQL: schema design, indexing, query tuning.\nComfort with JSON-document modeling in a relational store and query compilation to SQL.\nSQL query builders (Knex or similar); parameterized queries and SQL-injection prevention.\nCaching with Redis.\nDistributed systems & messaging\nEvent-driven / message-queue systems (AWS SQS, or Kafka/RabbitMQ/SNS equivalents): producer/consumer patterns, dead-letter queues, retries/backoff, and idempotency.\nDesigning for at-least-once delivery and eventual consistency.\nCloud & platform\nAWS services (SQS, EFS, S3, IAM, ECR) in a production context.\nContainerization with Docker; familiarity with Kubernetes deployments.\nSecurity\nOAuth2 / OIDC / JWT validation (RS256, JWKS), token propagation, and multi-issuer auth.\nSecure coding against the OWASP Top 10; multi-tenant isolation and row-level security.\nTesting & quality\nUnit, integration, and contract testing (Vitest/Jest or equivalent); test-driven mindset.\nLinters/formatters (Biome, ESLint/Prettier) and CI discipline.\nTooling & workflow\nGit and pull-request workflows; monorepo experience (Nx) a plus.\nCI/CD (GitHub Actions or similar).\nAI Tooling\nProductive use of AI-assisted developer tooling (e.g. GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor) to accelerate day-to-day backend development.\nIntegrating LLM / generative-AI capabilities into backend services (e.g. OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock) via SDKs, streaming responses, and prompt/response validation.\nFamiliarity with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG): embeddings, vector stores/search, and context assembly pipelines.\nNice to Have\nExperience with MongoDB-like query languages or building a query compiler/DSL.\nKEDA / autoscaling on queue depth; Istio service mesh; Argo Rollouts canary deploys.\nGitOps (ArgoCD) and schema-driven DB migrations (Atlas or Liquibase/Flyway).\nObservability stacks: New Relic APM, Sumo Logic, Prometheus, Pino logging.\nExperience with git-like versioning / CRDT / operational-transform data models.\nDomain knowledge in finance, ERP, FP&A, or accounting systems.\nBuilding data-migration / reconciliation frameworks at scale.\nExperience building AI/ML-powered backend features such as forecasting, anomaly detection, or natural-language querying over financial data.\nResponsibilities\nResponsibilities\nLead the design, development, and implementation of scalable, high-performance SaaS software \nTake technical ownership of products, systems, or services, ensuring robust and maintainable solutions.\nProvide guidance and mentorship to software engineers, fostering technical growth within the team and contribute to code reviews, architectural discussions, and technical design sessions.\nCollaborate with cross-functional teams, including product management, architecture, and quality assurance, to ensure successful product delivery.\nIdentify and address performance bottlenecks, security vulnerabilities, and technical debt and act as a technical expert in solving complex software challenges.\nDrive continuous improvement in software development processes, tools, and methodologies.\nStay current with emerging technologies and industry trends, applying them to improve product efficiency and quality.","description_format":"text","description_chars":4502,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":10,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[{"language":"English","level":"Advanced (C1)","optional":false}]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"India","iso":"IN","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["ERP & Business Management Software","HR & Payroll Software","Accounting & Tax Software"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-16T10:23:04Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":86,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.86,"p_room":1,"age_days":0,"expected_fill_days":69,"reasons":["conf:1","win:early","comp:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-10-16T20:34:16Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/sage-principal-engineer-backend","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/sage-principal-engineer-backend.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-16T20:34:16Z","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":1193,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-17T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"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":8779},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=8779"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fsage-principal-engineer-backend"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"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%2Fsage-principal-engineer-backend"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"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%2Fsage-principal-engineer-backend"},{"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/sage-principal-engineer-backend\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fsage-principal-engineer-backend"}]}