Description
What you'll own
- Architectural direction for the backend platform. API contract governance, service boundary design, data architecture, scaling and reliability strategy. Your decisions outlive your tenure.
- Canonical engineering standards. Author the system design principles, code review norms, testing standards, deployment guidelines, and post-mortem culture that the team operates within.
- Multi-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.
- System 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.
- Mentoring across the engineering ladder, from junior through Staff. You own the technical growth trajectory of backend engineers. Their progression is traceable to your guidance.
- Hands-on craft on the hardest problems.



You still ship code at exemplary craft level. Code reviews set the discipline's craft ceiling.
- Hiring contribution for senior engineering. You shape the technical interview rubric and contribute to senior-level hiring decisions.
- Peer-level partnership with VP Engineering and the founding team on platform strategy, hiring rubric, quarterly OKRs, and fundraising-relevant technical narrative.

What this role will not do
- Manage 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.
- Set company-wide product strategy. That is CEO, founder, and Head of Product scope.
- Replace the VP of Engineering on company-level engineering strategy or org design.
- Own Frontend, Mobile, or DevOps as primary remit. You partner across these; you do not lead them.

Requirements
What we're looking fo

📌 Principal Engineer (Bengaluru)
🏢 Unifize
📍 Bengaluru