Principal Backend & Platform Engineer

Industry: Technology, Information and Media

Seniority level: Mid-Senior level

Min Experience: 8 years

Location: Remote (India)

JobType: full-time

We are looking for an accomplished Principal Backend & Platform Engineer to drive the development, architecture, and scaling of high-performance backend systems and AI-enabled infrastructure. In this role, you will take deep ownership of critical platform components, define architectural strategy, and progressively expand into a technical leadership position—guiding engineering standards, mentoring talent, and shaping long-term technology vision.

This position is ideal for an engineering leader who enjoys solving complex distributed systems challenges, scaling advanced compute environments, and operating at the intersection of backend engineering, ML infrastructure, and product innovation.

Architect, develop, and optimize backend systems, scalable services, and production-grade APIs powering mission-critical workflows.

Lead architectural direction, evaluate technology trade-offs, and influence long-term engineering decisions related to scalability, observability, and system performance.

Build and operationalize ML inference systems at scale, leveraging GPU environments and high-efficiency inference servers.

Support infrastructure management including AWS environments, container orchestration, CI/CD automation, observability tooling, and security frameworks.

Guide and mentor engineers, foster engineering best practices, and drive a culture of high ownership and delivery excellence.

Partner with product teams to translate requirements into technical strategies and high-impact releases.

Drive continuous improvement across automation, performance tuning, monitoring, incident management, and deployment processes.

Collaborate cross-functionally with Customer Engineering, Sales, and Leadership to support enterprise-grade use cases and high-value deployments.

Backend: Python, FastAPI, Celery, REST APIs

Data & Search: MySQL, OpenSearch, Redis/Valkey

Applications: React, Next.js, Tailwind, Framer Motion, Figma

Infrastructure: AWS, Docker Swarm, S3, Cloudflare R2, n8n

AI Infrastructure: NVIDIA GPUs, Triton Inference Server, distributed inference pipelines

Workflows: Celery distributed task execution

8+ years of professional engineering experience building scalable backend services and distributed systems.

Proven expertise with Python, performance optimization, API architecture, and high-throughput system design.

Strong background with relational databases, caching layers, search engines, and asynchronous task execution.

Hands-on experience managing infrastructure in AWS and container environments, and implementing CI/CD workflows.

Exposure to ML deployment pipelines, GPU compute, or large-scale media processing systems.

Ability to make architectural decisions that balance speed, reliability, cost efficiency, and long-term maintainability.

Strong ownership mindset—takes responsibility end-to-end from concept to production rollout.

Excellent communication, ability to break down complex challenges, and influence without authority.

Experience guiding or mentoring engineers; committed to raising engineering quality bar.

Business-focused thinking: prioritizes value, outcomes, and customer impact.

3 Months: Own major backend components and deliver measurable performance improvements.

6–9 Months: Lead major product releases and collaborate on architectural roadmap execution.

12–18 Months: Own platform vision, scaling strategy, and core engineering operations.