{"id":863385,"url":"https://alion.io/job/unifize-principal-engineer-backend","title":"Principal Engineer - Backend","company":{"id":689989,"name":"Unifize","domain":"unifize.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/unifize","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Workable","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":6,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-11-01T06:10:25Z"}},"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":["Bengaluru, India"],"countries":["IN"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":23000,"max_usd":58000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":74},"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Clojure","optional":false},{"name":"Go","optional":false},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-05-01T00:00:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-05-01","last_verified_at":"2026-11-02T00:53:35Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":185,"trust":{"level":"stale","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale"],"days_open":184},"description":"What you'll own\nArchitectural direction for the backend platform. API contract governance, service boundary design, data architecture, scaling and reliability strategy. Your decisions outlive your tenure.\nCanonical engineering standards. Author the system design principles, code review norms, testing standards, deployment guidelines, and post-mortem culture that the team operates within.\nMulti-quarter cross-team architectural initiatives that span 2+ services and 2+ engineers. You define the scope, sequence the work, and follow through to production and post-launch outcomes.\nSystem stewardship at scale. Identify refactor candidates, drive debt management, set the modernisation roadmap. When a system in your stewardship area breaks, you drive the response from incident through post-mortem through prevention.\nMentoring across the engineering ladder, from junior through Staff. You own the technical growth trajectory of backend engineers. Their progression is traceable to your guidance.\nHands-on craft on the hardest problems. You still ship code at exemplary craft level. Code reviews set the discipline's craft ceiling.\nHiring contribution for senior engineering. You shape the technical interview rubric and contribute to senior-level hiring decisions.\nPeer-level partnership with VP Engineering and the founding team on platform strategy, hiring rubric, quarterly OKRs, and fundraising-relevant technical narrative.\nWhat this role will not do\nManage backend engineers as direct reports. That is the Engineering Manager scope. The Principal IC and Engineering Manager are deliberate forks in the engineering career ladder; this role is the IC fork.\nSet company-wide product strategy. That is CEO, founder, and Head of Product scope.\nReplace the VP of Engineering on company-level engineering strategy or org design.\nOwn Frontend, Mobile, or DevOps as primary remit. You partner across these; you do not lead them.\nRequirements\nWhat we're looking for\nMust-haves:\n7+ years of professional backend engineering with Principal IC scope already shipped at a previous role\nB2B enterprise SaaS at scale: Principal-level work on multi-tenant data, permission models, audit-grade workflows, regulated systems. Consumer-only or single-tenant backgrounds do not qualify.\nDeep distributed systems, API architecture, and PostgreSQL (or comparable RDBMS at scale) expertise\nA track record of leading multi-quarter cross-team architectural initiatives that shaped engineering for years afterwards\nSubstantive ownership of platform architecture in a previous role: API contract governance, service boundary decisions, data architecture roadmap\nMulti-grade mentoring outcomes: engineers explicitly cite you as the reason they grew. Names and grade progressions, not vague descriptions.\nA history of authoring canonical engineering standards, RFCs, ADRs, or strategy documents that became the operating norm of a team or org\nComfortable presenting and defending technical strategy to founders, board, and executives as a peer, not a deferential reporter\nYou have thought clearly about the IC vs Engineering Management trajectory and are choosing IC for this role. A later fork to Mgmt remains an open option; what we need is full investment in IC craft work during your time in this role.\nPermanent hard-nos:\nCannot articulate written technical strategy at the system or principle level\nArchitectural authority is positional (tenure, title) rather than earned through documented decisions\nHas not shipped at this scope in the last 3-4 years (architectural skills atrophy)\nStrongly preferred:\nGo or Clojure experience\nExperience evolving complex existing backends incrementally rather than only greenfield architecture\nRegulated environment exposure (fintech, life sciences, medical devices, pharma, manufacturing compliance)\nWhat excellent looks like in 12 months\nYour architectural decisions are referenced in design reviews across the team\nThe mid-level backend engineers you mentored advanced to senior\nFounders and the VP of Engineering consult you on platform strategy as a matter of course\nThe platform's engineering quality and architectural coherence have visibly risen\nAt least two architectural decisions were made differently (and better) because you were involved\nBackend engineers write better code and design documents than they did before you joined\nBenefits\nWhy join Unifize\nBe the technical authority for the backend of a B2B SaaS platform used by regulated manufacturers globally - a domain where correctness, reliability, and traceability matter more than speed alone\nA board-approved platform rewrite is underway; this role exists because the company recognised that the hardest backend problems need a dedicated, senior technical mind\nLead through code quality, architecture, and the standard you set, not through management\nOwn meaningful parts of the platform, not just tickets\nA team that values engineers who think clearly, write well, and update their views with evidence\nAbout Unifize\nAt Unifize, we are revolutionising the way life science and manufacturing companies manage processes and communication to innovate. Our eQMS SaaS platform accelerates product development and process innovation in regulated industries.\nIn a world where changing regulatory environments, market competition, customer demands, and technological advancements are constants, Unifize provides the platform that helps customers move past the constraints that hold progress back.\nSee our extensive case studies and testimonials and our medical device landing page for what we do and the customers we do it for. Four things customers say make Unifize different:\nNo-code process builder\nIntuitive, chat-based collaboration\nLow-code automation\nEmbedded AI\nWhy this role exists\nThe board-approved platform rewrite is underway, and the backend needs a single authoritative technical voice to define the standards that the entire backend team will operate within for the next several years. The Engineering Manager search is running in parallel; the EM role explicitly relies on having a Principal Engineer to lean on for architecture decisions. Without this role, the EM either makes architectural calls alone (risky) or escalates every technical decision to the VP of Engineering (not scalable).\nWe are deliberately hiring this as a Principal IC, not an Engineering Manager. We want the strongest backend technical mind we can find, whose full-time job is making the platform better and raising the bar for everyone else through code, architecture, and standards. Management of engineers belongs to the EM. Architectural authority belongs to you.","description_format":"text","description_chars":6641,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Security Compliance","Manufacturing & Industrial Software"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-13T11:41:32Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":7,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.243,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":184,"expected_fill_days":30,"reasons":["conf:0","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-11-01T06:10:25Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/unifize-principal-engineer-backend","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/unifize-principal-engineer-backend.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-02T02:48:04Z","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":4248,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-03T00:00:00Z"}},"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":689989},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=689989"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Funifize-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%2Funifize-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%2Funifize-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/unifize-principal-engineer-backend\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Funifize-principal-engineer-backend"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":863385}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"unifize.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":863385},"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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