About the Role:

We are looking for a Principal Engineer to join our Cloud Platform team and take ownership of the architecture and evolution of our multi-tenant SaaS platform. You will work at the intersection of backend engineering and cloud infrastructure, designing and building the systems that power our control plane and data plane at scale.

This is a high-impact, high-ownership role. You will be a technical anchor for the team: driving architecture decisions, mentoring engineers, and partnering with product and infrastructure leaders to shape the future of our cloud platform.

What you'll do:

Architecture & Design

- Own end-to-end architecture for the cloud platform, spanning control plane and data plane

- Design multi-tenant systems with strong isolation, security, and resource governance

- Define platform abstractions that work across hybrid environments: AWS, GCP, Azure, and on-premises

- Drive architectural reviews, RFCs, and ensure decisions are well-reasoned, documented, and scalable

Control Plane

- Architect and build systems for tenant provisioning, lifecycle management, and configuration

- Design cluster orchestration and management systems that operate reliably at scale

- Build APIs and automation that enable self-service for operators and tenants

- Ensure control plane is highly available, auditable, and observable

Data Plane

- Design data path components for high-throughput, low-latency workloads

- Build and enforce isolation boundaries between tenants at the data layer

- Optimise for performance, reliability, and cost efficiency at scale

Engineering Excellence

- Set technical direction and coding standards for the platform team

- Identify and address systemic risks — reliability, scalability, security, and operability

- Partner with SRE and DevOps on observability, incident response, and capacity planning

Mentorship & Leadership

- Mentor and grow senior and mid-level engineers

- Contribute to hiring — define bar, conduct interviews, help build the India platform team

- Collaborate closely with cross geo-based engineering and product teams

What you must bring:

SaaS Platform & Multi-Tenancy

- Hands-on experience building or operating multi-tenant SaaS platforms at scale silo/pool/bridge models, noisy neighbour mitigation, tenant resource quotas, and lifecycle automation (onboarding, provisioning, off-boarding)

- Knowledge of data isolation strategies schema-per-tenant, database-per-tenant, row-level security, and per-tenant encryption at rest

Control Plane & Data Plane

- Proven experience with control plane / data plane separation and cluster management — Kubernetes operators, CRDs, admission web-hooks, RBAC, and namespace isolation

- Understanding of configuration management at scale — GitOps workflows, feature flags, and dynamic config propagation across distributed environments

Cloud & Hybrid Infrastructure

- Deep expertise in at least two of AWS, GCP, or Azure VPC, IAM, managed Kubernetes (EKS/GKE/AKS), IaC (Terraform/Pulumi), and cost optimisation across hybrid environments

- Familiarity with service mesh technologies — Istio, Linkerd, or Envoy — for traffic management, mTLS, and microservices observability

Distributed Systems & Security

- Strong grasp of distributed systems fundamentals HA patterns, fault tolerance, observability (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana), and resilience testing

- Understanding of zero-trust security, secrets management (Vault, AWS Secrets Manager), and compliance frameworks (SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR) at the infrastructure level

AI-Augmented Engineering

- Actively uses AI coding assistants — Claude, Cursor, Copilot — for infrastructure tasks, runbook generation, incident analysis, and ADR drafting

- Able to craft effective prompts for complex engineering problems and critically evaluate AI output; evaluates and drives AI tool adoption across the platform team

Good to Haves

- Exposure to FinOps practices: cost attribution per tenant, showback/chargeback models, and cloud cost anomaly detection

- Familiarity with eBPF or low-level networking for custom observability or performance optimisation

- Contributions to open-source infrastructure or platform projects

What success looks like:

In 3 months:

- Deep understanding of the current platform architecture, gaps, and roadmap

- Shipped at least one meaningful improvement to control or data plane

- Established strong working relationships across engineering and product

In 6 months:

- Own and drive architecture for one major platform initiative end-to-end

- Identified and mitigated at least one systemic risk

- Actively contributing to India team hiring and growth

In 12 months:

- Recognised as the technical authority for the cloud platform in India

- Multi-tenant and hybrid cloud architecture significantly evolved and documented

- A set of senior engineers measurably grown in scope and impact under your mentorship