Principal Backend Engineer — Scale-Driven Systems

Encord; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

London office

Learning budget

Job summary

Encord is seeking a Principal Engineer for the Foundations team to own the hardest architectural calls in our backend systems. You will shape scalable databases, processing pipelines, and APIs that power the platform used by leading clients.

You will lead and mentor engineers, design robust distributed systems, and drive long-term strategy with a focus on reliability and performance across a data-intensive stack.

Qualifications

• 10+ years building large-scale backend infrastructure.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems and failure modes.
• Experience leading data migrations and re-architecture projects with real customer data.
• Proven reliability and operations ownership in production (monitoring, alerting, DevOps/SRE).
• Track record of raising engineering quality through reviews, testing, rollout and monitoring.

Responsibilities

• Design and lead major database and processing-system initiatives.
• Design performant protocols and APIs that customers use directly.
• Build robust distributed systems and reason about failure modes under load.
• Mentor and elevate engineers across the company through design reviews and pairing.

Skills

Distributed systems

Backend engineering

System architecture

Mentorship

Problem solving

Tools

Kubernetes

GCP

Python

Job description

Encord is seeking a Principal Engineer for the Foundations team to own the hardest architectural calls in our backend systems. You will shape scalable databases, processing pipelines, and APIs that power the platform used by leading clients.

You will lead and mentor engineers, design robust distributed systems, and drive long-term strategy with a focus on reliability and performance across a data-intensive stack.