Principal Backend Architect - Distributed Systems, Remote

Placements24; Sandton; Hybrid; ZAR 1,200,000 - 2,000,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity options

Fully remote work

Flexible scheduling

Professional development budget

Health insurance

Job summary

Placements24 is seeking a highly experienced Principal Backend Engineer to join a fully remote, elite engineering team. You will design, build, and scale distributed systems that power our platform, mentor senior engineers, and steer backend technical strategy.

You will tackle architectural challenges, optimize performance, and collaborate with product teams to deliver robust solutions in a remote-first environment. A strong background in large-scale systems and modern languages is required.

Qualifications

• Masters or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent extensive experience.
• 8+ years of backend software development experience focusing on distributed systems.
• Experience designing large-scale, high-throughput backend systems.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain scalable, fault-tolerant distributed systems.
• Lead architectural decisions and technology choices for backend services.
• Mentor and guide engineers to uphold technical excellence and best practices.
• Optimize system performance, reliability, and resource utilization.
• Collaborate with product management to deliver robust technical solutions.
• Champion best practices in coding, testing, security, and deployment.
• Troubleshoot and resolve complex production issues.

Skills

Distributed systems

Backend architecture

Mentoring

Cloud platforms

Kubernetes

Databases

Go

Java

Python

Education

Master's degree in Computer Science

PhD in Computer Science

Tools

Kubernetes

AWS

GCP

Azure

Docker

Job description

Placements24 is seeking a highly experienced Principal Backend Engineer to join a fully remote, elite engineering team. You will design, build, and scale distributed systems that power our platform, mentor senior engineers, and steer backend technical strategy.

You will tackle architectural challenges, optimize performance, and collaborate with product teams to deliver robust solutions in a remote-first environment. A strong background in large-scale systems and modern languages is required.