Principal Engineer (NodeJS/Python) - Bengaluru

CLANX; Bengaluru; On-site; INR 4,200,000 - 6,600,000; Full time

Job summary

Live2.ai, Bengaluru-based, is seeking a Principal Engineer to own core architecture for tenant isolation and distributed processing. This hands-on IC role will collaborate with the Head of Engineering and drive correctness, observability, and scalable systems in production.

Ideal candidates have 8+ years building production systems, deep PostgreSQL expertise, and experience with AI/LLM components, high availability, and security. Office-based in Bengaluru.

Qualifications

• Around 8+ years of experience building and operating production systems.
• Deep hands-on experience with distributed systems, including service boundaries, queues, asynchronous processing, event-driven architectures, retries, idempotency, concurrency, consistency, and failure recovery.
• Deep experience with relational data modelling and PostgreSQL, including indexing, partitioning, transactions, query optimisation, migrations, and multi-tenant data isolation.
• Experience scaling systems through horizontal scaling, caching, workload partitioning, rate limiting, backpressure, and performance optimisation.
• Experience designing for high availability, fault tolerance, observability, disaster recovery, recovery point and recovery time objectives, and safe reprocessing.
• Hands-on knowledge of authentication, authorisation, RBAC, tenant isolation, encryption, auditability, and enterprise security requirements.
• Experience architecting production AI/LLM components, including model abstraction, asynchronous inference, evaluation, versioning, cost controls, and traceability.
• Experience designing systems with guarantees around immutability, traceability, and reproducibility, with clear reasoning behind the trade-offs.
• Ability to make and defend architectural decisions involving cost, complexity, and operational risk.
• Ability to challenge a founder or Head of Engineering through written, evidence‑based reasoning.
• Continue to write production code regularly.

Responsibilities

• Own core architecture for tenant isolation, data models, distributed processing, correctness, and traceability.
• Design systems for high-volume ingestion, processing, search, analytics, and AI workloads.
• Own decisions around service boundaries, APIs, storage, caching, queues, and asynchronous processing.
• Co‑own architecture decision records, ensuring significant choices have written reasoning and more than one signer.
• Set technical standards through design reviews and practical examples.
• Handle escalations involving production correctness, performance, reliability, and architecture.
• Work with Site Reliability Engineers on availability, recovery, observability, and isolation guarantees.
• Help tech leads and senior engineers develop their technical judgment.
• Prototype difficult technical problems before handing them to a team.
• Work alongside the Head of Engineering, owning technical depth, architecture, and correctness while they own direction and the organisation.

Skills

Distributed systems

Tenant isolation

Reliability engineering

PostgreSQL data modelling

System design

Code review

Tools

TypeScript/Node.js

Python

PostgreSQL

OpenSearch

Redis

Kubernetes

Docker

GCP

Job description

Overview

Own core system architecture as Principal Engineer at Live2.ai. A hands-on individual contributor role focused on distributed systems, tenant isolation, reliability, and correctness, working alongside the Head of Engineering with no direct reports.

Company Details

Live2.ai is building an AI-native Social Content & Campaign Intelligence OS for global consumer brands. It helps brands monitor, audit, analyse, and act on intelligence across social content, influencer campaigns, user-generated content, and commerce. The company works with Fortune 500 global enterprise brands.

Website: https://live2.ai/

Requirements

• Around 8+ years of experience building and operating production systems, with continued responsibility after launch.




• Deep hands-on experience with distributed systems, including service boundaries, queues, asynchronous processing, event-driven architectures, retries, idempotency, concurrency, consistency, and failure recovery.




• Deep experience with relational data modelling and PostgreSQL, including indexing, partitioning, transactions, query optimisation, migrations, and multi-tenant data isolation.




• Experience scaling systems through horizontal scaling, caching, workload partitioning, rate limiting, backpressure, and performance optimisation.




• Experience designing for high availability, fault tolerance, observability, disaster recovery, recovery point and recovery time objectives, and safe reprocessing.




• Hands‑on knowledge of authentication, authorisation, role-based access control, tenant isolation, encryption, auditability, and enterprise security requirements.




• Experience architecting production AI/LLM components, including model abstraction, asynchronous inference, evaluation, versioning, cost controls, and traceability.




• Experience designing systems with guarantees around immutability, traceability, and reproducibility, with clear reasoning behind the trade‑offs.




• Ability to make and defend architectural decisions involving cost, complexity, and operational risk.




• Ability to challenge a founder or Head of Engineering through written, evidence‑based reasoning.




• Continue to write production code regularly.

The stack includes TypeScript/Node.js, Python, PostgreSQL with pgvector, OpenSearch, Redis, GCP, Kubernetes/GKE, Docker, and AI/LLM infrastructure. Experience with every technology is not expected. Strong fundamentals in distributed systems, databases, cloud architecture, and production engineering matter more than a particular framework.

Nice to have:

• Experience in regulated or externally audited environments.




• Experience with cryptographic integrity, including signing, chaining, and verification.




• Experience with AI/LLM components in the critical path.




• Experience handling technical escalations for enterprise customers.




• A previous Staff or Principal Engineer role at a company of a similar stage.

Responsibilities

• Own core architecture for tenant isolation, data models, distributed processing, correctness, and traceability.




• Design systems for high-volume ingestion, processing, search, analytics, and AI workloads.




• Own decisions around service boundaries, APIs, storage, caching, queues, and asynchronous processing.




• Co‑own architecture decision records, ensuring significant choices have written reasoning and more than one signer.




• Set technical standards through design reviews and practical examples.




• Handle escalations involving production correctness, performance, reliability, and architecture.




• Work with Site Reliability Engineers on availability, recovery, observability, and isolation guarantees.




• Help tech leads and senior engineers develop their technical judgment.




• Prototype difficult technical problems before handing them to a team.




• Work alongside the Head of Engineering, owning technical depth, architecture, and correctness while they own direction and the organisation.

Job Details

Bengaluru, in office.

Interview Process

• Initial Screening




• System Design and Architecture




• Hands‑on Technical Discussion




• Founder and Head of Engineering Discussion

Important Note

ClanX is a recruitment partner, helping Live2.ai hire a Principal Engineer.