Principal Engineer

Zuellig Pharma is a leading healthcare solutions company in Asia, and our purpose is to make healthcare more accessible to the communities we serve. We provide world-class distribution, digital, and commercial services to support the growing healthcare needs in this region.

The company was started a hundred years ago and has grown to become a multibillion-dollar business covering 17 markets with over 12,000 employees. Our people serve more than 200,000 medical facilities and work with over 450 clients, including the top 20 pharmaceutical companies in the world.

Purpose of the Role:

The candidate will join Zuellig Pharma's Group Technology as a Principal Engineer within the E-commerce and Data Services (EDS) cluster. As the most senior individual contributor in the engineering organisation, you operate at org-wide scope - overseeing the FSO process and technical quality across all projects, while partnering directly with the Head of Engineering to establish team structures, engineering governance, and technical standards that scale across the Malaysia hub and beyond.

You are the senior technical voice in leadership discussions, bridging engineering execution with strategic direction. Your decisions set the long-horizon technical trajectory of Zuellig Pharma's digital commerce and supply chain platforms.

What You’ll Do:

Fixed Scope Outsourcing (FSO) - Org-Wide Oversight

• Oversee the FSO process at org-wide scope - setting BRD review standards, vendor evaluation frameworks, and integration quality gates that all squads follow.
• Ensure consistency, accountability, and technical rigour across all outsourced workstreams in the hub.
• Review and resolve escalations from Staff Engineers on complex FSO delivery, risk, or integration issues.

Technical Governance & Process Architecture

• Partner directly with the Head of Engineering to design team structures, engineering workflows, and technical governance frameworks for the Malaysia hub.
• Establish and own org-wide engineering standards - coding standards, API design principles, testing requirements, release processes, and security baselines.
• Define the platform and tooling strategy - evaluating, selecting, and retiring technologies at the org level.
• Lead architecture review processes, ensuring major technical decisions are well-reasoned, documented, and aligned with long-term platform direction.

Strategic Technical Leadership

• Act as the senior technical voice in leadership and product strategy discussions - translating business direction into technical roadmap and structural decisions.
• Identify cross-cutting technical risks, capability gaps, and scaling challenges before they impact delivery, and own the remediation roadmap.
• Contribute to hiring standards and levelling frameworks - defining what technical excellence looks like at each grade in the organisation.

Infrastructure & Platform Strategy

• Set the org-wide infrastructure and platform direction - cloud architecture, Kubernetes fleet standards, IaC governance, and observability strategy.
• Drive platform engineering initiatives that improve developer productivity, reliability, and delivery velocity across all teams.
• Own the cost efficiency and security posture of the engineering platform in collaboration with Operations and InfoSec.

Full Stack Engineering & Mentorship

• Provide deep technical guidance across backend, frontend, and infrastructure domains - credible and hands-on across the full stack.
• Mentor Staff and Senior Engineers, investing in their growth toward broader architectural and leadership responsibility.
• Set the example for AI-assisted development - driving adoption, defining best practices, and raising the team's capability with AI tooling.

What will make you successful:

Must-Have:

Education & Experience

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.
• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a clear track record of org-level technical leadership.
• Proven experience defining engineering standards, governance frameworks, and platform strategy at an organisational scale.
• Experience in regulated industries (pharmaceuticals, healthcare, fintech, or logistics) is a strong advantage.

Technical - Full Stack

• Expert-level proficiency in Golang is required. Java familiarity is a nice to have.
• Deep frontend architectural knowledge in React.js / Next.js - SSR, performance, state management, micro-frontend patterns.
• Advanced database expertise - query optimisation, schema design, and data architecture at scale across PostgreSQL and enterprise database environments.
• Deep experience with microservices architecture, Domain-Driven Design (DDD), and event-driven systems at enterprise scale.
• Expert-level REST, GraphQL, and gRPC API design and governance.

Technical - Infrastructure & Platform

• Expert Kubernetes knowledge - multi-cluster management, resource governance, autoscaling, and platform reliability.
• Deep GCP expertise (primary); AWS and Azure familiarity.
• Strong IaC practice - Terraform or equivalent at org scale.
• Comprehensive observability strategy experience - Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, distributed tracing, incident management.
• Security-aware platform design - understanding of compliance requirements in regulated industries.

Technical - AI

• Expert-level user of AI development tooling; able to define AI-assisted development standards and best practices for the engineering organisation.

Soft Skills

• Exceptional communication and presentation skills - able to influence C-level stakeholders and inspire engineering teams simultaneously.
• Systems thinker who can hold org-level complexity and still engage at the technical detail level when needed.
• Highly collaborative, empathetic leadership style - builds trust across engineering, product, and business functions.
• Decisive under ambiguity; brings clarity and direction to complex, open-ended technical problems.

Advantage to Have:

Technical - AI

• Expert-level user of AI development tooling; able to define AI-assisted development standards and best practices for the engineering organisation.

Soft Skills

• Exceptional communication and presentation skills - able to influence C-level stakeholders and inspire engineering teams simultaneously.
• Systems thinker who can hold org-level complexity and still engage at the technical detail level when needed.
• Highly collaborative, empathetic leadership style - builds trust across engineering, product, and business functions.
• Decisive under ambiguity; brings clarity and direction to complex, open-ended technical problems.

What we offer:

• We are committed to fostering an inclusive environment where our employees can learn, grow, and achieve shared success.
• We champion diversity, equity, and inclusion, ensuring every individual feels valued, respected, and treated fairly.
• As a leading multi-market healthcare solutions provider, we empower our employees to gain comprehensive knowledge and expertise in the dynamic healthcare industry across the region.
• Enjoy the flexibility to effectively balance your work and personal life while taking charge of your career journey through our empowering growth opportunities.
• Our Total Rewards program is designed to support your overall well-being in every aspect.