Principal Engineer, Mobile Platform & Backend Systems

AlphaSense, Inc.; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

AlphaSense is seeking a Principal Engineer for Mobile Platform & Backend Systems to lead the design and evolution of our backend services and client-facing APIs. You will work across mobile, web, and AI-driven workflows to shape scalable, maintainable systems while balancing performance with reliability.

Based in London, you will influence across teams, drive architectural decisions, design authentication and identity, and mentor engineers to build reusable patterns that power product

Qualifications

• Deep production backend and distributed-systems expertise, with cross-team impact.
• Strong hands-on engineering with contributions to production code and system evolution.
• Experience designing REST and GraphQL APIs with careful placement of business logic.
• Understanding of authentication, authorization, entitlements, and session management.
• Experience improving reliability and performance with observability and validation.
• Track record leading technical change across teams through influence.
• Product and stakeholder leadership aligning technical decisions with customer value.

Responsibilities

• Shape the systems behind product experiences: backend APIs and architecture.
• Lead across engineering organizations: align with senior leaders, Product, and customers.
• Turn architecture into production systems: deliver services across team boundaries.
• Shape shared identity and access: evolve authentication and sessions.
• Leave engineers stronger: coaching and reusable patterns across teams.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

REST & GraphQL APIs

Authentication & security

Observability

Production reliability

Technical leadership

Cross-team collaboration

Tools

Kafka

Auth0

Microsoft identity

Job description

Principal Engineer, Mobile Platform & Backend Systems

About AlphaSense:

The world’s most sophisticated companies rely on AlphaSense to remove uncertainty from decision-making. With market intelligence and search built on proven AI, AlphaSense delivers insights that matter from content you can trust. Our universe of public and private content includes equity research, company filings, event transcripts, expert calls, news, trade journals, and clients’ own research content.

The acquisition of Tegus by AlphaSense in 2024 advances our shared mission to empower professionals to make smarter decisions through AI-driven market intelligence. Together, AlphaSense and Tegus will accelerate growth, innovation, and content expansion, with complementary product and content capabilities that enable users to unearth even more comprehensive insights from thousands of content sets. Our platform is trusted by over 6,000 enterprise customers, including a majority of the S&P 500. Founded in 2011, AlphaSense is headquartered in New York City with more than 2,000 employees across the globe and offices in the U.S., U.K., Finland, India, Singapore, Canada, and Ireland. 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 judgment 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 management, including trust boundaries and the security implications of client-service interactions.
• Experience improving customer-visible reliability and performance across client and backend systems, with practical expertise in observability and production validation.
• A track record of leading consequential technical change across teams through influence rather than reporting authority.
• Product and stakeholder leadership that connects technical decisions to customer value. Demonstrated success challenging assumptions and building alignment with senior leaders, balancing immediate customer and product needs with durable foundations other teams can build on.

Preferred:

• Experience building production systems for AI-powered search, research, or analysis workflows.
• Experience with enterprise identity and managed applications, such as Auth0, Microsoft identity, or MDM/MAM ecosystems.
• Experience designing shared configuration or service discovery for multi-tenant platforms and dedicated customer environments.
• Experience designing and building event-driven systems, including publish/subscribe or event-streaming architectures such as Kafka.

AlphaSense is an equal-opportunity employer. We are committed to a work environment that supports, inspires, and respects all individuals. All employees share in the responsibility for fulfilling AlphaSense’s commitment to equal employment opportunity. AlphaSense does not discriminate against any employee or applicant on the basis of race, color, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, age, religion, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, military or veteran status, disability, or any other non-merit factor. This policy applies to every aspect of employment at AlphaSense, including recruitment, hiring, training, advancement, and termination.

In addition, it is the policy of AlphaSense to provide reasonable accommodation to qualified employees who have protected disabilities to the extent required by applicable laws, regulations, and ordinances where a particular employee works.