Principal Software Engineer

• Lead the design and evolution of platform architecture, ensuring scalability, reliability, and maintainability.

• Define and enforce architectural standards and best practices across services, APIs, and data layers.

• Evaluate and introduce new technologies (e.g., service mesh, observability, caching strategies) to improve platform capabilities.

• Contribute high-quality, production-grade code in Java and other relevant languages.

• Build and optimize core components such as API gateways, caching layers (Valkey), and data access patterns for MongoDB and Postgres.

• Collaborate with DevOps to ensure seamless CI/CD, observability, and infrastructure automation in Kubernetes environments.

• Act as a technical mentor to senior and mid-level engineers, fostering a culture of engineering excellence and continuous learning.

• Lead technical design reviews, architecture discussions, and code quality initiatives.

• Partner with engineering managers and product leads to align technical direction with business goals.

• Work closely with SREs, QA, and security teams to ensure platform reliability, testability, and compliance.

• Collaborate with product and customer-facing teams to translate complex requirements into scalable solutions.

• Influence and contribute to the technical roadmap and long-term platform strategy.

• Identify architectural risks and propose mitigation strategies early in the development lifecycle.

• Drive innovation by exploring emerging technologies and patterns relevant to distributed systems and API ecosystems.

• 10+ years of experience in backend or platform engineering, with at least 3+ years in a principal or staff-level role.

• Deep expertise in Java, with strong knowledge of concurrency, memory management, and performance tuning.

• Proven experience designing and scaling API-driven platforms and integration services.

• Strong understanding of Envoy and API gateways.

• Hands-on experience with Valkey (or Redis), MongoDB, and PostgreSQL, including replication, sharding, and performance optimization.

• Advanced knowledge of Kubernetes, container orchestration, and cloud-native infrastructure.

• Strong grasp of distributed systems principles, including fault tolerance, eventual consistency, and capacity management.

• Experience with event-driven architectures, asynchronous messaging, and data streaming (e.g., Kafka) is a plus.

• Familiarity with test automation strategies, performance testing, and observability tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry).

• Experience integrating quality gates and monitoring into development processes.

• Excellent communication skills with the ability to influence across engineering, product, and leadership teams.

• Proven ability to lead through ambiguity, drive consensus, and deliver results in a fast-paced environment.

• Passion for mentoring and growing engineering talent.

Axway