Principal Backend Engineer

UST; Bengaluru; On-site; INR 4,000,000 - 7,000,000; Full time

Job summary

UST is seeking a Principal Backend Engineer in Bengaluru to raise backend quality across delivery teams. You will contribute hands-on, lead technically, mentor engineers, and drive architectural execution for production-ready services.

You will stay close to the codebase, influence design decisions, review PRs, and help teams deliver scalable and reliable backend systems with strong emphasis on observability, security, and performance.

Qualifications

• 8+ years backend software engineering experience.
• Excellent Java engineering skills with Spring/Spring Boot and distributed systems.
• Strong focus on code quality, testing, and architectural judgment.

Responsibilities

• Provide hands-on technical leadership for backend engineering across one or more delivery teams.
• Write production-grade Java and Spring Boot code while guiding design, implementation, testing, review, and production readiness.
• Translate requirements into well-designed backend services, APIs, and reusable patterns.
• Review code regularly to improve correctness, maintainability, design quality, and observability.
• Mentor engineers through pairing, design discussions, debugging, refactoring, and implementation guidance.
• Guide teams in API design, asynchronous integrations, event-driven flows, persistence layers, and service boundaries.
• Help teams solve distributed-systems issues like consistency, retries, idempotency, concurrency, backpressure, and performance under load.
• Define and promote testing strategies across backend systems (unit, integration, contract, performance, etc.).
• Identify and eliminate weak abstractions, fragile integrations, and unnecessary complexity.

Skills

Java

Spring Boot

Distributed systems

Code reviews

Mentoring

API design

Performance tuning

Observability

Security

Cloud-native

Job description

We are looking for a Principal Backend Engineer who can raise backend engineering quality across delivery teams through hands‑on contribution, strong technical leadership, mentoring, and architectural execution.

This is a senior technical leadership role, not a people‑management position.

Your influence will come from the quality of your code, your design judgment, your code reviews, your ability to mentor engineers, and your capacity to help teams deliver well‑structured, production‑ready backend systems.

You will remain close to the code every day.

You will help teams make sound design decisions, improve implementation quality, review pull requests, solve difficult engineering problems, establish reusable patterns, and maintain a high bar for production readiness.

This role requires excellent Java and Spring/Spring Boot engineering skills, combined with a strong understanding of distributed systems.

You know how to design backend services that operate reliably under real production conditions: latency, concurrency, retries, partial failures, evolving APIs, data consistency challenges, operational incidents, changing business requirements, and sustained production load.

You understand that technical leadership is not achieved through architecture diagrams alone.

It requires working with engineers on the implementation details: API design, domain modelling, testing strategy, transaction boundaries, asynchronous processing, error handling, observability, performance, security, deployment safety, and long‑term maintainability.

In an environment increasingly supported by AI‑assisted development, you apply strong engineering judgment to validate, refine, and sometimes reject generated output. AI‑assisted code must meet the same standards for correctness, resilience, testability, security, observability, modularity, and maintainability as manually written code.

We value a collaborative, merit‑driven engineering culture. Technical leaders are expected to challenge weak designs constructively, help engineers improve, simplify unnecessary complexity, and raise engineering standards through practical execution.

What You Will Do

Provide hands‑on technical leadership for backend engineering across one or more delivery teams.

Write production‑quality Java and Spring Boot code while guiding engineers through design, implementation, testing, review, and production readiness.

Translate platform architecture and product requirements into well‑designed backend services, APIs, asynchronous components, integrations, and reusable engineering patterns.

Review code regularly and use code reviews to improve correctness, maintainability, design quality, testing, observability, security, and engineering discipline.

Mentor engineers through pairing, design discussions, debugging, refactoring, code reviews, and practical implementation guidance.

Guide teams in designing APIs, asynchronous integrations, event‑driven flows, persistence layers, service boundaries, transaction handling, error models, and operational controls.

Help teams solve distributed‑systems problems involving consistency, retries, idempotency, concurrency, backpressure, failure isolation, transaction boundaries, resilience, and performance under load.

Define and promote strong testing strategies across backend systems, including unit, integration, contract, component, API, performance, and production validation.

Identify and eliminate weak abstractions, fragile integrations, inappropriate service boundaries, unnecessary complexity, and technical debt that compromises long‑term maintainability.

Ensure backend systems are observable, secure, scalable, resilient, diagnosable, deployable, and maintainable.

Work closely with architects, backend engineers, platform engineers, QA, DevOps, product teams, and client‑facing delivery teams.

Ensure that delivery speed does not come at the expense of engineering quality.

Build reusable examples, reference implementations, shared engineering patterns, coding guidelines, and technical documentation that raise engineering standards across teams.

You will influence multiple engineering teams, establish reusable standards, mentor technical leaders, challenge weak designs, and help translate technical direction into production‑quality execution.

This is not a passive advisory role and not a traditional people‑management position.

Your authority will come from technical credibility, judgment, execution, and your ability to make other engineers better.

You will work closely with the CTO to establish technical standards, identify engineering gaps, raise implementation quality, create reusable engineering patterns, and ensure that architectural direction is reflected in real code and operational behaviour.

The objective is to act as a technical force multiplier across the engineering organization.

Skills and Experience We Are Looking For

• Minimum 8 years of professional backend software engineering experience, ideally 10-12 years, with meaningful hands‑on ownership of production backend systems.
• Excellent modern Java engineering skills, including strong knowledge of the language, concurrency, collections, error handling, performance, modularity, and maintainable software design.
• Deep experience with Spring and Spring Boot, including building, testing, securing, operating, and evolving production backend services.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, including latency, partial failures, retries, idempotency, consistency, concurrency, transaction boundaries, backpressure, and operational failure modes.
• Strong experience designing and implementing asynchronous and event‑driven systems, including producers and consumers, event contracts, schema evolution, replay, retries, failure handling, and eventual consistency.
• Strong API design experience, including resource and contract design, versioning, validation, error models, pagination, security, documentation, and backward compatibility.
• Strong understanding of backend testing strategies, including unit, integration, contract, component, performance, and automated regression testing.
• Strong performance‑engineering skills, including profiling, JVM behaviour, memory usage, concurrency, database interaction, connection management, serialization, caching, and high‑throughput service behaviour.
• Experience designing and operating cloud‑native backend systems using containers, managed infrastructure, automated delivery, observability, and modern deployment practices.
• Extensive code‑review experience, with the ability to identify design flaws, correctness problems, maintainability risks, missing tests, security weaknesses, performance issues, and operational risks.
• Strong architectural understanding combined with the ability to translate architecture into working software, appropriate service boundaries, reusable components, and pragmatic implementation decisions.
• Strong understanding of persistence and data‑access design, including schema design, indexing, transaction management, query performance, and appropriate use of different persistence models.
• Strong understanding of production observability, including structured logging, metrics, tracing, ing, diagnostics, and incident investigation.
• Strong mentoring capability, with the ability to raise engineering standards through example and daily collaboration rather than formal authority.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to explain technical decisions, trade‑offs, risks, and implementation approaches clearly across globally distributed engineering teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working in financial services, banking, payments, lending, servicing, compliance, or other regulated enterprise environments.
• Experience designing and operating high‑throughput messaging and event‑streaming platforms.
• Experience deploying and operating containerized applications in highly available, dynamically scaled production environments.
• Strong understanding of production monitoring, distributed tracing, structured logging, ing, and operational diagnostics.
• Experience designing and tuning both relational and non‑relational persistence systems.
• Experience implementing mature software‑delivery practices, including automated testing, quality gates, static analysis, dependency management, security scanning, deployment automation, and safe production releases.
• Strong understanding of domain modeling, separation of concerns, modular software design, service decomposition, and different approaches to structuring complex backend systems.
• Experience building reusable backend frameworks, shared libraries, platform components, templates, or reference implementations consumed by multiple teams.
• Strong security awareness, including authentication, authorization, delegated identity, secrets management, input validation, auditability, secure APIs, and least‑privilege design.
• Experience working with large, complex, evolving codebases where architectural consistency, refactoring discipline, and long‑term maintainability matter.
• Experience evaluating competing technologies and architectural approaches based on requirements, trade‑offs, operational complexity, scalability, performance, and maintainability rather than familiarity alone.
• Experience living with the long‑term consequences of engineering decisions: supporting, patching, debugging, scaling, migrating, and evolving backend systems after they have become critical production infrastructure.