Principal Backend Engineer – Distributed Systems Leader

United States Digital Space LLC; Greater London; On-site; GBP 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Equity

London office 4+ days/week

Annual learning & development budget

Travel for events across UK/Europe

Team lunches & offsites

Job summary

Encord, the universal data layer for AI, is seeking a Principal Engineer to join our Foundations team in London. You will own the hardest architectural calls, design and lead major database and processing-system initiatives, and drive the platform to scale with data at the next tier.

You will mentor engineers, enforce reliability in production, and shape long-term strategy with autonomy. This on-site role aligns with our fast-growing, high-impact environment in the UK.

Qualifications

• 10+ years building large-scale backend infrastructure.
• Staff/Principal level with company-wide technical influence.
• Experience leading data migrations and system splits.
• Proven ability to own reliability, monitoring, and DevOps practices.

Responsibilities

• Design and lead major database and processing-system initiatives.
• Design performant protocols and APIs used by customers.
• Build robust distributed systems and reason about failures at scale.
• Level up engineers through design reviews, pairing, and mentorship.

Skills

Distributed systems

Staff/Principal level

Data migrations

Reliability / SRE

Architecture reviews

Mentorship

Tools

Python

Kubernetes

GCP

React

Job description

Encord, the universal data layer for AI, is seeking a Principal Engineer to join our Foundations team in London. You will own the hardest architectural calls, design and lead major database and processing-system initiatives, and drive the platform to scale with data at the next tier.

You will mentor engineers, enforce reliability in production, and shape long-term strategy with autonomy. This on-site role aligns with our fast-growing, high-impact environment in the UK.