Principal Engineer - Backend

Encord
London
Workplace: OnsiteFull timeFunction: Communications, PR & CommunitySkills: ["Technical leadership","Mentorship","Problem-solving","Influence without authority","Rigor"]

Own Encord’s backend foundations: design major database and processing-system initiatives, build reliable distributed systems, and make the hard architectural calls that shape the platform for years. You’ll develop performant protocols and customer-facing APIs, drive reliability and operations best practices, and raise engineering quality through design/code reviews, pairing, and mentorship—without adding process. This is a senior individual contributor role with company-wide technical influence.

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FursaFursa
Encord
Encord
17 hours ago

Principal Engineer - Backend

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Source: Company careers pageValidated by: Fursa AI
Last checked: 16 hours agoStatus: Live

Job Summary

Own Encord’s backend foundations: design major database and processing-system initiatives, build reliable distributed systems, and make the hard architectural calls that shape the platform for years. You’ll develop performant protocols and customer-facing APIs, drive reliability and operations best practices, and raise engineering quality through design/code reviews, pairing, and mentorship—without adding process. This is a senior individual contributor role with company-wide technical influence.
Location: London
Workplace: Onsite
Employment Type: Full time
Job Function: Communications, PR & Community
Seniority: Mid level

Key Responsibilities

  • •Design and lead major database and processing-system initiatives.
  • •Design performant protocols and APIs (including label-format API) used directly by customers across product and engineering.
  • •Build robust distributed systems and reason about failure modes and behavior under load.
  • •Level up engineers across the company through design reviews, pairing, and mentorship.
  • •Raise engineering quality via architecture reviews, code reviews, testing, rollout, and monitoring practices.
Travel: Medium travel

Pay and Benefits

Equity and Bonus:Equity
Perks:Annual LeaveLearning BudgetEquityTravel AllowancePublic Holidays

Key Requirements

  • •10+ years building large-scale backend infrastructure applications, including several years operating at staff/principal level with company-wide technical influence.
  • •Deep expertise in distributed systems (databases, processing systems, replication, partitioning, queuing, caching) and how they fail under load at scale.
  • •Experience leading large-scale data migrations and system re-architecture projects with real customer data.
  • •Experience owning reliability and operations in production, including monitoring, alerting, and DevOps/SRE.
  • •A track record of raising engineering quality across teams through architecture reviews, code reviews, testing, rollout, and monitoring practices.
Experience:Distributed systemsBackend infrastructureData-intensive systemsDevOps/SREData migrations
Skills:Technical leadershipMentorshipProblem-solvingInfluence without authorityRigor
Tech Stack:PythonTypeScriptReactKubernetesGCPPyTorchCUDARay

Company Brief

Encord
Provides a computer vision data platform for labeling, dataset management, and model evaluation, enabling teams to build, validate, and monitor ML models with collaboration and tooling for high-quality annotated data.
Industry: Data Infrastructure
Company Size: Medium (51 to 250 employees)
Growth: Growth Stage Startup
Funding: Series A
Headquarters: London, United Kingdom
Founded: 2019
WebsiteLinkedIn