Principal Engineer, Foundations: Architect Scalable Systems

Encord; Greater London; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

London office 4+ days/week

Learning & development budget

UK/Europe travel for customers/events

Equity

Job summary

Encord is seeking a Principal Engineer for the Foundations team to own the hardest architectural calls, shaping the platform for years. You will design and lead major database and processing-system initiatives, build robust distributed systems, and raise the engineering bar across the company.

The role demands deep experience with large-scale distributed systems, reliability ownership, and the ability to influence across teams in a fast-moving environment.

Qualifications

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

Responsibilities

• Design and lead major database and processing-system initiatives.
• Design performant protocols and APIs used across product and engineering.
• Build robust distributed systems and reason about failure modes under load.
• Level up engineers across the company through design reviews, pairing, and mentorship.

Skills

Distributed systems

Staff/Principal level influence

Reliability & DevOps

Architectural decision making

Cross-team influence

Tools

Kubernetes

GCP

Python

PyTorch

CUDA

Ray

Job description

Encord is seeking a Principal Engineer for the Foundations team to own the hardest architectural calls, shaping the platform for years. You will design and lead major database and processing-system initiatives, build robust distributed systems, and raise the engineering bar across the company.

The role demands deep experience with large-scale distributed systems, reliability ownership, and the ability to influence across teams in a fast-moving environment.