Principal Python Engineer

Ejadah Management Consultancy - Ema Partners; Riyadh; On-site; SAR 200,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading consultancy firm in Saudi Arabia seeks a Principal Python Engineer to drive engineering excellence and own backend systems. The ideal candidate will have 8-12+ years of backend engineering experience, deep experience with Python, and expertise in designing scalable APIs and relational databases. This role focuses on defining backend architecture, overseeing core services, and ensuring production readiness through effective observability practices. Strong communication skills are essential for influencing decisions across teams.

Qualifications

• 8–12+ years of professional backend engineering experience.
• Deep hands-on experience building production systems in Python.
• Extensive experience developing complex B2B SaaS platforms.
• Strong expertise in modern Python web frameworks (FastAPI preferred).
• Proven ability to design and maintain robust RESTful APIs.

Responsibilities

• Own design, development, and operation of core backend services.
• Define and evolve backend architecture for scalability and security.
• Design high-quality, well-documented APIs using Python.
• Take ownership of data architecture and relational database design.
• Drive engineering best practices around testing.

Skills

Backend engineering

Python

API design

Database design

Software architecture

CI/CD systems

cloud-native environments

Asynchronous programming

RESTful APIs

Communication

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

Key Responsibilities:

As a Principal Python Engineer, you will be a technical authority for the backend platform and a driver of engineering excellence. Your responsibilities include:

• Owning the design, development, and operation of core backend services and APIs that power digital signatures, document workflows, identity, and integrations.
• Defining and evolving backend architecture to ensure scalability, security, and maintainability across cloud, on-prem, and hybrid deployments.
• Designing high-quality, well-documented APIs using Python (primarily FastAPI or similar frameworks), with a strong focus on consistency, performance, and ease of integration.
• Leading the design of core domain services, including:
• Signature and approval workflows
• Document processing, storage, and lifecycle management
• Authentication, authorization, roles, and permissions
• Integrations with external systems such as identity providers, storage services, and notification platforms
• Partnering closely with Product and Engineering leadership to translate complex business requirements into clear technical designs and phased delivery plans.
• Taking ownership of data architecture and relational database design (e.g., MySQL/PostgreSQL), ensuring data integrity, performance, and long-term scalability.
• Driving engineering best practices around testing, including unit, integration, and end-to-end test strategies.
• Identifying and addressing performance bottlenecks through profiling, query optimization, caching strategies, background processing, and concurrency patterns.
• Influencing and improving CI/CD pipelines and deployment workflows in collaboration with DevOps and SRE teams.
• Ensuring production readiness through strong observability practices (logging, metrics, tracing) and operational excellence.
• Acting as a technical mentor and reviewer, raising the overall quality of code, design, and decision-making across the team.
• Leading incident response efforts, conducting root-cause analysis, and implementing preventative architectural improvements.

Required Background & Experience

We are looking for an engineer who operates at a principal level — someone trusted to make architectural decisions and own complex systems in production.

Skills

Minimum qualifications:

• 8–12+ years of professional backend engineering experience.
• Deep, hands‑on experience building production systems in Python, with several years as a primary language.
• Extensive experience developing complex B2B SaaS platforms or similarly demanding backend systems.
• Strong expertise in modern Python web frameworks (FastAPI preferred; Django/Flask acceptable with demonstrated architectural depth).
• Proven ability to design and maintain robust RESTful APIs (and/or gRPC), with strong knowledge of HTTP semantics, authentication, authorization, versioning, and pagination.

Advanced experience with relational databases:

• data modeling and schema design
• indexing and performance tuning
• migrations and data consistency strategies
• Solid understanding of async programming models, background workers, and task queues (e.g., Celery, Redis, or equivalents).
• Strong software architecture fundamentals:
• domain-driven design concepts
• clean abstractions and separation of concerns
• resilience, fault tolerance, and error‑handling patterns
• Hands‑on experience with testing strategies across multiple layers.
• Practical knowledge of containers and cloud‑native environments (Docker, Kubernetes, major cloud providers).
• Comfort working with CI/CD systems and Git‑based development workflows.
• Strong awareness of backend security best practices and secure system design.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to influence technical direction across teams.

Strong Advantages (Nice to Have)

• Experience working in regulated or security‑critical domains (e.g., digital identity, fintech, govtech, healthcare).
• Familiarity with object storage systems and caching layers.
• Experience integrating with IAM solutions (OAuth2, OIDC, SAML, MFA, SSO).
• Exposure to event‑driven architectures and messaging systems.
• Experience with observability and monitoring stacks.
• Background in multi‑tenant architectures and/or on‑prem enterprise deployments.