Principal Software Engineer - Product Platforms

AlphaSense; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

AlphaSense is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to define and build shared, API‑first product platforms that power multiple product surfaces, integrations, and agentic workflows. You will design platforms as products—well‑designed APIs, clear contracts, reliability guarantees, and a roadmap driven by real product needs.

You’ll work across teams to align long‑term technical direction while owning end‑to‑end systems.

Qualifications

• Senior staff/principal‑level software engineer with strong backend experience.
• Experience building product platforms or shared services.
• Proven API design, build, and operation at scale.

Responsibilities

• Act as a technical owner for API‑first architecture.
• Design, build, evolve high‑scale APIs for internal and external use.
• Lead agentic workflows including orchestration and state management.
• Drive API standards and best practices through reviews.
• Partner with Product, Platform, and SRE teams to ensure reliability and security.
• Mentor senior engineers and raise technical bar.

Skills

API design

RESTful APIs

GraphQL

Distributed systems

Platform services

Mentoring engineers

Job description

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 Role:

We’re looking for a Principal Software Engineer to help define and build shared, API-first product platforms at AlphaSense that power multiple product surfaces, integrations, and agentic workflows.

In this role, you’ll focus on building platforms as products: well-designed APIs, clear contracts, strong reliability guarantees, and a roadmap driven by real product needs. These platforms are consumed by internal product teams, external integrations, including AI agents.

This role sits at the intersection of hands‑on engineering and cross‑product technical leadership. You’ll stay close to the code while shaping how product platforms are designed, evolved, and adopted across the company. You’ll also work across multiple teams and domains, helping to align long‑term technical direction while still owning end‑to‑end systems. This is not a people‑management role, nor is it a purely advisory architecture role. We’re explicitly looking for a Principal who enjoys building, prototyping, iterating, and solving complex problems in production.

What You’ll Do:

• Act as a technical owner and force multiplier for API‑first architecture across the company
• Design, build, and evolve high‑scale APIs used by internal teams, external customers, and intelligent agents
• Lead the development of agentic workflows, including orchestration, state management, tooling, and integration patterns
• Drive API standards, design principles, and best practices through hands‑on work and technical reviews
• Tackle complex cross‑team problems where requirements are ambiguous, and constraints are real
• Partner with Product, Platform, and SRE teams to ensure APIs are reliable, observable, secure, and scalable
• Identify and reduce systemic technical risks while enabling teams to move faster
• Mentor senior engineers and raise the technical bar through example, not hierarchy

Who you are:

• Extensive experience as a senior staff/principal‑level software engineer working on applications and backend systems
• Experience building product platforms or shared services consumed by multiple product teams
• Proven track record of designing, building, and operating APIs at scale
• Strong hands‑on experience with RESTful APIs
• Some experience with GraphQL (design, usage, or operating in production)
• Deep understanding of system design, performance, reliability, and evolution over time
• Strong bias toward hands‑on contribution and ownership of real systems
• Ability to influence technical direction across teams through credibility and execution

Nice to have:

• Experience building or enabling agentic or AI‑driven workflows
• Familiarity with MCP (Model Context Protocol) or similar agent integration patterns
• Experience working in large‑scale, distributed systems environments
• Exposure to API governance, versioning strategies, and backward compatibility at scale
• Experience working closely with the platform and SRE teams

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.