Principal Engineer, Mobile Platform & Backend Systems

Alphasense; City Of London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 140,000; Full time

Job summary

AlphaSense is seeking a senior backend/platform engineer for its Mobile Engineering group. You will help shape the backend systems behind product experiences, aligning APIs and services across teams to deliver scalable, secure foundations for iOS/Android clients.

You will collaborate with cross-functional partners to set architectural direction, implement robust production services, and drive improvements that enable faster, reliable product development across Web and Mobile.

Qualifications

• Deep production backend and distributed-systems expertise, including service boundaries, data ownership, consistency, failure recovery, and integration models.
• Strong hands-on engineering with personal contributions to production code and system evolution.
• Experience designing client-facing REST and GraphQL APIs, with sound judgement about business-logic placement and compatibility.
• Understanding of mobile lifecycle and network constraints affecting backend design.

Responsibilities

• Shape the systems behind product experiences: Set technical direction for client-facing APIs and the backend architecture behind them.
• Lead across engineering organizations: Work across application, search and AI, and shared platform teams to shape priorities.
• Turn architecture into production systems: Lead delivery of services and subsystems spanning team boundaries and prove them in production.
• Shape shared identity and access: Partner with User Management and platform teams to evolve how users authenticate across Web and Mobile.
• Leave engineers and teams stronger: Coach and promote reusable patterns while delivering with leadership support.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

REST APIs

GraphQL APIs

Authentication

Job description

About AlphaSense:

AlphaSense is the AI platform redefining market intelligence and workflow orchestration, trusted by thousands of leading organizations to drive faster, more confident decisions in business and finance. The platform combines domain-specific AI with a vast content universe of over 500 million premium business documents - including equity research, earnings calls, expert interviews, filings, news, and internal proprietary content. Purpose-built for speed, accuracy, and enterprise-grade security, AlphaSense helps teams extract critical insights, uncover market-moving trends, and automate complex workflows with high-quality outputs. With AI solutions like Generative Search, Generative Grid, and Deep Research, AlphaSense delivers the clarity and depth professionals need to navigate complexity and obtain accurate, real-time information quickly. For more information, visit www.alpha-sense.com . Come join us.

About the Team

Our diverse Product & Engineering team values innovation, collaboration, and the continuous improvement of our platform. We offer a dynamic work environment where employees can grow and thrive while working on cutting-edge technology that shapes the future of AI and search.

At AlphaSense, we believe that diverse experiences and perspectives are critical to our success. We are committed to creating an inclusive workplace where all employees feel valued and empowered to be their authentic selves.

About the Role

AlphaSense is moving beyond search with SuperAnalyst : AI-powered workflows that monitor change, update outputs, and surface what matters as situations evolve. Mobile brings that intelligence into the moments when customers are away from their desks.

Delivering those experiences through native applications presents a distinctive engineering challenge: services evolve continuously while released apps remain in customers' hands. Designing for that reality creates an opportunity to shape how AlphaSense builds shared product capabilities, with benefits reaching well beyond iOS and Android.

Based in Mobile Engineering, you will use a close connection to customer and product needs to shape backend systems across engineering organizations. You will help decide which cross-team problems to tackle and where architectural investment will have the greatest impact, then work with the owning engineers to build and prove the solution in production.

What You'll Do

Shape the systems behind product experiences: Set technical direction for client-facing APIs and the backend architecture behind them. Work with service and platform owners to simplify how backend services connect and support product workflows across clients.

Lead across engineering organizations: Work across application, search and AI, and shared platform teams to shape technical priorities around customer and product needs. Represent Mobile with senior engineering leaders, Product, and customers, building agreement on the architecture and investment needed to deliver shared capabilities.

Turn architecture into production systems: Lead delivery of services and subsystems that span team boundaries, from choosing the technical approach to implementing the hardest parts and proving them in production. Design these systems for reuse beyond the initial use case.

Shape shared identity and access: Partner with User Management and platform teams to evolve how users authenticate, maintain sessions, and access product capabilities across Web and Mobile. Build native-client requirements into shared identity and configuration services.

Leave engineers and teams stronger: Help engineers deepen their technical judgment and build the expertise to own and evolve the systems you deliver together. Combine hands-on delivery with coaching and reusable patterns, whether embedding with an existing team or bringing engineers together around a focused mission with leadership support.

What We're Looking For

Your strongest experience should be in backend and platform engineering, with client needs informing your architectural decisions. Prior iOS or Android development experience is not required.

Required:

• Deep production backend and distributed-systems expertise, including service boundaries, data ownership, consistency, failure recovery, and integration models. A track record of simplifying complex architectures with impact across teams or domains.
• Strong hands-on engineering experience, with significant personal contributions to production code and system evolution. Ability to develop a deep understanding of unfamiliar codebases and turn investigation into sound engineering decisions.
• Experience designing client-facing REST and GraphQL APIs, with sound judgement about business-logic placement, product states, and backward compatibility. Understanding of how mobile lifecycle and network constraints affect backend design.
• Strong understanding of authentication, authorization, entitlements, and session m