Principal Software Engineer is a senior technical leader responsible for defining architecture, system design, and engineering direction across complex enterprise systems. This role drives cross-team technical decisions, platform standardization, and end-to-end software lifecycle ownership, ensuring scalable, secure, and reliable solutions. The role requires solid understanding of AI/ML concepts and their application in real-world systems, alongside deep expertise in software engineering fundamentals and distributed system design.

Primary Responsibilities:
Architecture & Design
Lead design of distributed, scalable systems and microservices architectures
Define service boundaries, APIs, and integration patterns (event-driven, async)
Technical Leadership
Act as technical authority for architecture and complex problem-solving
Influence engineering decisions across teams without formal authority
Engineering Standards & Platforms
Establish reusable patterns, standards, and shared components
Drive adoption of contemporary engineering practices and automation-first mindset
Cloud & Distributed Systems
Drive cloud-native solutions across AWS / Azure / GCP
Lead microservices, containerisation (Docker, Kubernetes),



and platform engineering
DevOps & Delivery Excellence
Lead CI/CD pipelines, release automation, and deployment reliability
Improve engineering productivity through standardised tooling and automation
Reliability & Observability
Ensure production readiness via monitoring, logging, tracing, alerting
Drive diagnostics and operational excellence practices
Decision-Making & Problem Solving
Make high-impact technical decisions under ambiguity
Balance scalability, reliability, security, and delivery trade-offs
Comply with the terms and conditions of the employment contract, company policies and procedures, and any and all directives (such as, but not limited to, transfer and/or re-assignment to different work locations, change in teams and/or work shifts, policies in regards to flexibility of work benefits and/or work setting, alternative work arrangements, and other decisions that may arise due to the changing business environment). The Company may adopt, vary or rescind these policies and directives in its absolute discretion and without any limitation (implied or otherwise) on its ability to do so

📌 Principal Software Engineer Hyderabad (India)
🏢 Optum
📍 India