Principal Software Engineer

As a Principal Software Engineer at Keka, you won't be joining a company; you'll be shaping one. This is a rare opportunity to operate at the intersection of deep technical complexity and massive business impact.

Responsibilities:

• Architect and evolve Keka's distributed platform to handle 10x growth, designing for multi-region deployments, horizontal scalability, and sub-second latencies across complex HR workflows.
• Own the technical strategy for one or more platform pillars, and translate ambiguous business needs into elegant, scalable system designs.
• Design and implement event-driven architectures, distributed data pipelines, and fault-tolerant microservice topologies that can operate reliably at enterprise scale with stringent SLA requirements.
• Establish and champion engineering standards across the organisation from API design contracts and observability frameworks to CI/CD maturity models and production readiness reviews.
• Drive cross-team technical alignment on platform-wide concerns: service mesh strategy, data consistency models, schema evolution, backward compatibility, and API versioning.
• Mentor and elevate senior engineers, conducting architecture reviews, leading design forums, and building a culture of technical rigour, intellectual curiosity, and pragmatic innovation.
• Partner with Product, Security, and Infrastructure leadership to define the technology roadmap and make high-stakes build-vs-buy decisions with long-term architectural integrity in mind.

Requirements:

• Distributed Systems Design: Strong hands-on experience building highly available, fault-tolerant distributed systems. Solid understanding of CAP trade-offs, consensus (Raft/Paxos), distributed transactions (Saga/2PC), and eventual consistency at scale.
• System Architecture: Proven ability to design scalable microservices architectures, decompose monoliths, and apply DDD, CQRS, and event-driven patterns in enterprise environments.
• Data Engineering at Scale: Experience building large-scale data platforms, real-time streaming systems (e. g., Kafka), and leveraging diverse storage solutions (relational, NoSQL, columnar).
• Performance and Reliability: Expertise in SLO-driven engineering, observability, capacity planning, and operating systems with 99.99%+ availability. Skilled in diagnosing latency and reliability issues.
• Cloud and Infrastructure Strong knowledge of cloud-native architectures, containers, orchestration, IaC, and multi-region deployments across major cloud providers.
• Security and Compliance: Understanding of zero-trust principles, encryption standards, access control models (RBAC/ABAC), and compliance frameworks (SOC 2 GDPR, ISO 27001).
• API and Platform Engineering: Experience designing scalable, versioned APIs (REST, GraphQL, gRPC) and platform capabilities for internal and external consumers.
• Technical Leadership: Ability to drive architectural decisions, author design docs/RFCs, mentor engineers, and influence technical direction across teams.
• You've led zero-to-one platform initiatives building foundational infrastructure that became the backbone of a product or company.
• Published work, open-source contributions, or conference talks on distributed systems, database internals, or platform engineering.
• Experience in multi-tenant SaaS architecture, particularly in regulated domains like HR, fintech, or healthcare.
• You've built and scaled engineering teams as a force multiplier through mentorship, design reviews, and cultivating a culture of excellence.