Senior Principal Engineer - Distributed Systems Leader

Encord; London (KY); On-site; USD 163,000 - 257,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Equity

Commission

London office 4+ days/week

25 days annual leave

Learning & development budget

Travel for customer visits

Company lunches twice a week

Monthly socials & team offsites

Job summary

Encord is hiring a Principal Engineer for the Foundations team, the backend backbone powering our AI data platform. You will own the hardest architectural calls, build scalable distributed systems, and shape the platform for years to come.

You’ll design major database and processing-system initiatives, lead critical API work, and level up engineers through mentorship and code reviews. Expect autonomy and impact across teams.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience designing and operating large-scale distributed backend systems.
• Deep understanding of how systems fail and behave under heavy load at scale.
• Proven track record leading complex data migrations or re-architecture with real customer data.

Responsibilities

• Design and lead major database and processing-system initiatives.
• Design performant protocols and APIs used by customers across product and engineering.
• Build robust distributed systems and reason about failure modes under load.
• Mentor engineers and raise engineering quality through reviews and standards.

Skills

Distributed systems

Backend engineering

Staff/principal leadership

Data migrations

Reliability & SRE

Architecture reviews

Influence without authority

Tools

Python

Kubernetes

GCP

PyTorch

CUDA

Job description

Encord is hiring a Principal Engineer for the Foundations team, the backend backbone powering our AI data platform. You will own the hardest architectural calls, build scalable distributed systems, and shape the platform for years to come.

You’ll design major database and processing-system initiatives, lead critical API work, and level up engineers through mentorship and code reviews. Expect autonomy and impact across teams.