Principal Software Engineer, Backend (Go)

Job description

**This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Principal Software Engineer, Backend (Go) based in India.** This is a senior backend engineering opportunity focused on building the Go services powering a multi-tenant control plane for GPU infrastructure. You will own complex features end to end, from API contracts and database schemas to orchestration, testing, and Kubernetes packaging. Working across distributed engineering teams in the US, Europe, and India, you will help shape the architecture of a platform designed for enterprise-scale infrastructure. The role combines backend engineering, distributed systems, security, Kubernetes, and cloud-native technologies in a highly technical environment. You will make architectural decisions that directly influence the reliability, scalability, and correctness of production infrastructure. This is an opportunity to mentor engineers, influence technical direction, and build foundational services for modern AI and data-intensive workloads. ### Accountabilities: - **Backend Engineering:** Design and build production-grade Go microservices for a multi-tenant infrastructure platform, including database schemas, migrations, service logic, and integrations. - **Distributed Orchestration:** Design and implement durable workflows using Temporal, applying sound patterns for idempotency, retries, timeouts, determinism, and fault tolerance. - **API Development:** Design versioned public REST APIs using OpenAPI and contribute to multi-language SDKs generated from API specifications. - **Event-Driven Architecture:** Build reliable asynchronous communication between services using distributed streaming or message-broker platforms. - **Identity & Access Management:** Implement authentication and authorization boundaries across IAM systems and API gateways, including OIDC/JWT, service-to-service authentication, tenant-scoped RBAC, routing, and rate limiting. - **Identity Provisioning:** Extend identity capabilities through standards-based user and group lifecycle provisioning with SCIM and help align platform permissions with Kubernetes-native RBAC. - **Testing & Quality:** Develop unit, integration, and end-to-end tests as an integral part of every feature, ensuring changes meet high standards for reliability and correctness. - **Production Readiness:** Instrument services with structured logging, metrics, and audit trails, supporting effective monitoring, troubleshooting, and operational visibility. - **Cloud-Native Packaging:** Package and deploy services using Docker, Helm, and Kubernetes, ensuring production-ready delivery across cloud-native environments. - **Technical Leadership:** Review peer code, lead technical and architectural discussions, investigate production incidents to root cause, and ensure fixes include appropriate regression coverage. - **Mentorship:** Support junior engineers through onboarding, design guidance, technical feedback, and code reviews while helping raise engineering standards across the team. ### Requirements - **Professional Experience:** 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including at least 5 years building production backend services with Go. - **Go Expertise:** Strong command of Go fundamentals, including concurrency, context propagation, error wrapping, and standard-library HTTP routing using modern Go versions. - **Database Engineering:** Deep experience with relational databases, including schema design, migrations, transactions, query optimization, and PostgreSQL workloads at scale in multi-tenant environments. - **API Design:** Proven experience designing versioned REST APIs consumed by external clients, together with generated or maintained client SDKs. - **Distributed Systems:** Experience building durable or event-driven asynchronous systems using workflow engines, streaming platforms, or message brokers, with a strong understanding of idempotency and retry semantics. - **Security & IAM:** Solid understanding of OIDC, JWT validation, RBAC modeling, tenant isolation, IAM platforms, and API gateway security. - **Kubernetes:** Strong working knowledge of Kubernetes, including deploying, inspecting, and debugging workloads and understanding Kubernetes RBAC. - **Required Technologies:** Production experience with Temporal, multi-tenant SaaS or PaaS platforms, Cluster API or Kubernetes controllers/operators, Keycloak, API gateways, PostgreSQL, Docker, Helm, Kubernetes, and streaming or message-broker platforms. - **Engineering Practices:** Strong testing discipline, Git-based development workflows, rigorous code review practices, and CI/CD experience with GitHub Actions or equivalent tooling. - **Technical Leadership:** Experience mentoring engineers, contributing to architectural decisions, and leading design discussions. - **Communication:** Clear written English and strong communication skills for asynchronous design documentation, technical reviews, and collaboration across international time zones. - **AI & Infrastructure Exposure:** Experience with GPU infrastructure, AI/ML workload scheduling on Kubernetes, or related cloud-native infrastructure is an advantage. - **Additional Technical Skills:** Exposure to k0s, SCIM provisioning, Kubernetes RBAC federation, sqlc, OpenAPI code generation, Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Python, TypeScript, security engineering, or CNCF open-source projects is a plus. - **Education:** Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience with 10 years of relevant professional experience. ### Benefits - **Competitive Compensation:** Receive a competitive compensation package with a strong benefits plan. - **Professional Development:** Access professional development and training opportunities to support continued technical and career growth. - **Conferences & Industry Exposure:** Opportunities to attend conferences and participate in relevant technical working groups. - **Technical Community:** Engage with hackathons, technical talks, company events, and knowledge-sharing initiatives. - **Open-Source Innovation:** Work in an environment focused on cutting-edge open-source technologies and cloud-native infrastructure. - **Collaborative Culture:** Join a high-energy, international environment that values openness, collaboration, thoughtful risk-taking, and continuous improvement. - **Global Collaboration:** Work alongside talented engineering teams across India, Europe, and the United States on technically challenging infrastructure problems. - **Additional Benefits:** Healthcare, leave, and other employee benefits may be provided according to the partner company’s applicable policies.