Principal Engineer - Backend

About the role

Encord is seeking a Principal Engineer to join the Foundations team, responsible for building the reliable, scalable, and fast backend systems that support the company's AI data platform. This senior individual contributor role involves owning complex architectural decisions, planning for long-term system growth, and raising the engineering bar across the organization. You will lead major initiatives in database and processing systems while mentoring engineers to drive technical excellence.

Responsibilities

• Design and lead major database and processing-system initiatives
• Design performant protocols and APIs that customers use directly
• Build robust distributed systems and reason rigorously about failure modes and load behavior
• Level up engineers across the company through design reviews, pairing, and mentorship

Required skills

• Distributed systems
• Backend infrastructure
• Database design
• System architecture
• Reliability engineering
• DevOps
• SRE

Nice to have

• Python
• TypeScript
• React
• Kubernetes
• GCP
• PyTorch
• CUDA
• Ray

Qualifications

• 10+ years building large-scale backend infrastructure applications
• Several years operating at staff/principal level with company-wide technical influence

Benefits

• Competitive salary
• Commission
• Equity
• 25 days annual leave
• UK public holidays
• Annual learning & development budget
• Travel for customer visits and events
• Company lunches
• Monthly socials
• Bi-annual team offsites

About the Company

Encord is the universal data layer for AI that helps 300+ AI teams train and run models on the right data. The company has raised $60M in Series C funding and is growing rapidly, with a team of 150+ working at the frontier of AI.