Principal Engineer (Performance, Platform and AI Acceleration)

ESP Engineered; Bengaluru; On-site; INR 2,000,000 - 3,000,000; Full time

Job summary

ESP Engineered is seeking a Principal Engineer in Bengaluru, India. This high-impact role focuses on performance optimization and cloud cost efficiency, with responsibilities including diagnosing bottlenecks, leading CI/CD improvements, and adopting AI workflows. Ideal candidates should have 8-12+ years of experience, strong backend skills, and a proven track record in enhancing system reliability. Join a growing team of 450+ professionals in a vibrant work environment.

Qualifications

• 8-12+ years of experience building and scaling web applications and backend systems.
• Proven track record improving production performance and reliability.
• Strong backend fundamentals: API design, caching, databases, distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• Lead performance diagnosis across frontend and backend systems.
• Strengthen CI/CD pipelines for faster builds and reliable rollbacks.
• Enable responsible adoption of AI-assisted development workflows.

Skills

Performance optimization

API design

Backend development

Cloud cost reduction

Leadership

Tools

AWS

GCP

Python

React/Next.js

Job description

Principal Engineer (Performance, Platform and AI Acceleration)

8 - 12

Full-Time

About Us

We are a specialty chemicals manufacturing company with a full stack solution from R&D to manufacturing and globalsupply chain of chemicals to 26+ countries. Headquartered in Bengaluru, India we cater to pharmaceutical, agrochemical, industrial chemicals, food, nutraceuticals and animal nutrition industries.

Our B2B fulfillment platform supports businesses globally in developing and manufacturing chemicals from lab to commercial scale. With a team of in-house R&D experts and scientists, we offer custom synthesis and route scouting services to support manufacturers in product development.

We are VC backed - here is a read . We are 450+ people strong and have entities in India, Japan, USA, UAE and Indonesia. We are currently exporting to over 17 countries from India.

We are hiring a Principal Engineer to drive engineering excellence across performance optimization, platform reliability, DevOps maturity, and cloud cost efficiency.

This is a high-impact, hands-on leadership role for someone who can diagnose complex bottlenecks, simplify architecture, strengthen delivery systems, and enable faster, higher-quality releases using modern engineering practices and AI-assisted development workflows.

You will elevate the entire engineering organization by setting technical standards, mentoring teams, and aligning architecture decisions with product and business outcomes.

Key Outcomes

• Improve application and API performance across critical user journeys
• Increase platform reliability and operational predictability
• Reduce cloud and infrastructure costs through architectural and FinOps discipline
• Improve engineering velocity via better systems, standards, and AI-enabled workflows

Core Responsibilities

1. Performance & Scalability

• Lead performance diagnosis across frontend and backend systems
• Optimize API efficiency (caching, batching, pagination, payload tuning, N+1 elimination)
• Improve database performance (indexing, query plan analysis, connection pooling, read/write optimization)
• Define and enforce performance standards and SLOs (latency, throughput, error rate)
• Drive improvements in Core Web Vitals and backend response metrics

2. Platform, DevOps & Reliability

• Strengthen CI/CD pipelines for faster builds, safer deployments, and reliable rollbacks
• Improve infrastructure patterns for environments, secrets, observability, and readiness
• Lead incident management, postmortems, and root cause analysis
• Improve deployment frequency and reduce MTTR
• Identify infrastructure waste across compute, storage, logs, and networking
• Establish cost visibility per service and environment
• Drive architectural decisions that reduce unit cost without impacting reliability

4. Engineering Efficiency & AI Enablement

• Enable responsible adoption of AI-assisted development workflows (test generation, refactoring, migrations)
• Build reusable internal accelerators (templates, scaffolds, shared libraries, golden paths)
• Mentor engineers and raise technical maturity across squads

5. Product & Technical Leadership

• Translate ambiguous problems into measurable goals and execution plans
• Partner with Product to prioritize based on impact and feasibility
• Drive cross-functional alignment on architecture and roadmap
• Lead through influence and technical credibility

Requirements

• 8–12+ years of experience building and scaling web applications and backend systems
• Proven track record improving production performance and reliability
• Strong backend fundamentals: API design, caching, databases, distributed systems
• Demonstrated experience reducing cloud costs through engineering improvements
• Strong ownership mindset and excellent communication skills

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience optimizing React / Next.js applications (Core Web Vitals, bundle size, hydration)
• Experience tuning Python / FastAPI services (profiling, async patterns, throughput tuning)
• Hands-on experience with AWS or GCP , containers, and modern observability stacks (OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Datadog, ELK)
• Experience building internal platforms or developer productivity systems.
• Experience integrating AI tooling into engineering workflows with quality guardrails.