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 major architectural decisions, designing large-scale distributed systems, and mentoring engineers to raise the technical bar across the organization. The role focuses on long-term system planning to handle significant increases in data volume over the coming years.

Responsibilities

• Design and lead major database and processing-system initiatives
• Design performant protocols and APIs, such as our label-format API, that customers use directly
• Build robust distributed systems and reason rigorously about how they fail and how they behave under load
• Level up engineers across the company through design reviews, pairing, and mentorship, without adding process for its own sake

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
• Equity
• 25 days annual leave
• UK public holidays
• Annual learning & development budget
• Travel for customer visits, events, and conferences
• 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 over 150 people working at the frontier of AI.