Role Description

We're looking for a Principal Engineer to own the architecture and technical direction of our core platform. You'll operate at the intersection of high-scale distributed systems and fintech-grade security and compliance, turning fast-growing but increasingly complex product surfaces into resilient, extensible platforms. This is a hands-on technical leadership role: you will design and review critical systems, set engineering standards across teams, and mentor senior engineers, while staying close enough to the code to unblock the hardest problems yourself.

Key Responsibilities

- Own end-to-end architecture for high-concurrency, high-availability platform services, from design through production operability.
- Define and drive adoption of architectural patterns (event-driven microservices, multi-tenant SaaS, distributed locking/coordination) across multiple engineering teams.
- Partner with Product, Risk/Compliance, and cross-functional engineering teams (Payments, Onboarding, DevOps) to translate business goals into platform capabilities.
- Establish and champion engineering best practices: blameless post-mortems, proactive health monitoring, and structural fixes over firefighting.
- Directly mentor senior and staff-level engineers; act as a force multiplier for technical decision-making across the org.
- Drive down operational toil through automation, self-service tooling, and platform abstractions that let other teams move faster independently.
- Represent engineering in architecture reviews, technical due-diligence, and cross-org planning.

Qualifications

- 7+ years of skilled software engineering experience, with a track record of owning systems at scale in production.




- Proven experience architecting and scaling backend platforms handling significant user growth (e.g., 10x-20x) or transaction volume, ideally in fintech, payments, or another regulated domain.
- Deep expertise in distributed systems design: microservices, async workflow orchestration (e.g., Temporal or equivalent), event-driven architecture, and data consistency trade-offs.
- Strong hands-on experience with at least one of Java or Python, and the ability to review and guide code across languages/stacks.
- Experience with cloud infrastructure and platform tooling (AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD pipelines) and observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or similar).
- Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional engineering initiatives and mentor engineers.
- Excellent written and verbal communication; comfortable driving alignment across engineering, product, and compliance stakeholders.
- Experience working with enterprise ERP integrations (SAP, Oracle, or similar) is a plus, especially around master data sync, financial workflows.
- Hands-on experience with agentic development is required — you regularly build with and orchestrate AI coding agents (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot Agent Mode) as part of your day-to-day engineering workflow, not just as an occasional autocomplete tool.
- Working knowledge of ETL and data pipeline design is a plus; hands-on experience with AWS Glue is preferred. SFTP/EDI, webhooks, API gateways, batch reconciliation

Skills:- Java, Python, TypeScript, High-level design, Agentic AI, PostgreSQL, LangGraph, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Docker, Kubernetes, grafana, Apache Kafka, Redis, DynamoDB, SQL, Celery and Elastic Search

📌 Lead Software Engineer - Java/Python (Hyderabad)
🏢 KnackLabs
📍 Hyderabad