Principal Engineer - Backend

About this role

About us Encord is the universal data layer for AI that helps 300+ AI teams train and run models on the right data. Our platform indexes, curates, annotates, and evaluates data across the full AI lifecycle, from development through production. Trusted by Woven by Toyota, AXA, UiPath, Zipline, and more. We're an ambitious team of 100+ working at the frontier of AI and have raised $60M in Series C funding from Wellington Management, CRV, Next47 and Y Combinator.

The role We're looking for a Principal Engineer to join our Foundations team, the backend backbone that builds the reliable, scalable, fast systems everyone else at Encord builds on top of. The team's core challenges sit deep in distributed and data intensive systems. The product mindset on this team is different from most of the company: short-term product insight matters less, long-term matters a lot. Our Foundations team plans around how the next 6, 12, and 24 months will look, with an overarching shape to the problem: handling multiple orders of magnitude the data we handle today.

This is our most senior individual contributor role. You'll own the hardest architectural calls, make the trade-offs that shape the platform for years, and raise the engineering bar across the company. Encord is growing rapidly, with our product as the key driver of that growth. A year ago, we were a team of 100, now, we're over 150 and continuing to accelerate. The systems that got us here won't get us to what's next.

That's the problem you'll own. What you'll do Design and lead major database and processing-system initiatives Design performant protocols and APIs, such as our label-format API, that customers use directly. This work sits across both product and engineering 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 Who we're looking for You've seen and built more than most.

You've personally designed, built, and operated large-scale distributed systems in production, and you've lived with your architectural decisions long enough to know which trade-offs actually matter Your impact shows up in the output of the engineers around you, not just your own commits. You make hard things look simple and teach others to do the same You want your work to have a tangible outcome for people. You're not satisfied with building products that do not see the light of day You are a builder.