Principal Engineer

This is a full time/Direct role with one of our client - A product based company established in 1969.

About the Role

We are seeking a Principal Engineer who will act as the technical owner and architect for their product domain. You will play a critical role in modernizing platforms, scaling services, improving reliability, and mentoring engineers, while partnering with Engineering Managers, Product, AI Labs, Platform, and fellow PEs to ensure our solutions are scalable, reliable, secure, cost-efficient, and aligned with CAs mission of supporting students, teachers, and the full learning lifecycle.

What You Will Do

Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Own architecture, technical direction, and long-term system health for your domain.
• Design scalable, reliable systems used across student and educator workflows.
• Maintain clear, up-to-date architectural documentation and drive CA-wide standards.

Execution & Engineering Excellence

• Lead development of Java/Spring Boot microservices and contribute to ReactJS where needed.
• Ensure high-quality code, strong testing discipline, and clean interfaces.
• Drive platform modernization, performance improvements, and responsible refactoring.

Cross-Team Collaboration & Influence

• Lead complex, multi-team integrations and align data contracts, interfaces, and ownership.
• Influence engineers, fellow PEs, EMs, PMs, and partner teams without authority.
• Promote reusable patterns and prevent siloed or bespoke solutions.

Operational Ownership

• Own reliability, performance, uptime, and on-call readiness for your systems.
• Lead incident analysis, drive long-term fixes, and define meaningful SLIs/SLOs.
• Ensure secure design practices and optimize cloud cost for your services.

Mentorship & Technical Growth

• Mentor engineers at all levels in design, debugging, system thinking, and patterns.
• Partner with the Engineering Manager on architecture, quality, predictability, and team development.
• Contribute actively to CA-wide technical forums and engineering communities.

What You Bring

Technical Expertise

• 1218 years of experience building large-scale backend or full-stack systems.
• Deep expertise in Java, Spring Boot, distributed systems, microservices, APIs.
• Working knowledge of ReactJS and front-end integration patterns.
• Strong debugging skills in production-scale distributed environments.
• Solid grounding in databases, caching, queues, CI/CD, containers, and observability.

Architecture & Leadership

• Demonstrated ability to design and evolve complex systems supporting high-scale student/teacher products.
• Proven influence across multiple teams with strong decision-making and trade-off analysis.
• Track record of raising engineering standards and mentoring senior engineers.

Operational & Cloud Experience

• Experience owning production systems, SLIs/SLOs, incident response, and performance tuning.
• Familiarity with AWS or Azure cloud ecosystems.
• Strong understanding of secure development and privacy considerations for student data.

Nice to Have

• Experience with PHP/LAMP stack.
• EdTech or large-scale learning platform experience.
• Exposure to ML/AI-powered personalization workflows.