Key Responsibilities:
As a Principal Python Engineer, you will be a technical authority for the backend platform and a driver of engineering excellence. Your responsibilities include:
• Owning the design, development, and operation of core backend services and APIs that power digital signatures, document workflows, identity, and integrations.
• Defining and evolving backend architecture to ensure scalability, security, and maintainability across cloud, on-prem, and hybrid deployments.
• Designing high-quality, well-documented APIs using Python (primarily FastAPI or similar frameworks), with a strong focus on consistency, performance, and ease of integration.
• Leading the design of core domain services, including:
• Signature and approval workflows
• Document processing, storage, and lifecycle management
• Authentication, authorization, roles, and permissions
• Integrations with external systems such as identity providers, storage services, and notification platforms
• Partnering closely with Product and Engineering leadership to translate complex business requirements into clear technical designs and phased delivery plans.
• Taking ownership of data architecture and relational database design (e.g., MySQL/PostgreSQL), ensuring data integrity, performance, and long-term scalability.
• Driving engineering best practices around testing, including unit, integration, and end-to-end test strategies.
• Identifying and addressing performance bottlenecks through profiling, query optimization, caching strategies, background processing, and concurrency patterns.
• Influencing and improving CI/CD pipelines and deployment workflows in collaboration with DevOps and SRE teams.
• Ensuring production readiness through strong observability practices (logging, metrics, tracing) and operational excellence.
• Acting as a technical mentor and reviewer, raising the overall quality of code, design, and decision-making across the team.
• Leading incident response efforts, conducting root-cause analysis, and implementing preventative architectural improvements.
Required Background & Experience
We are looking for an engineer who operates at a principal level — someone trusted to make architectural decisions and own complex systems in production.
Skills
Minimum qualifications:
• 8–12+ years of professional backend engineering experience.
• Deep, hands-on experience building production systems in Python, with several years as a primary language.
• Extensive experience developing complex B2B SaaS platforms or similarly demanding backend systems.
• Strong expertise in modern Python web frameworks (FastAPI preferred; Django/Flask acceptable with demonstrated architectural depth).
• Proven ability to design and maintain robust RESTful APIs (and/or gRPC), with strong knowledge of HTTP semantics, authentication, authorization, versioning, and pagination.
Advanced experience with relational databases:
• data modeling and schema design
• indexing and performance tuning
• migrations and data consistency strategies
• Solid understanding of async programming models, background workers, and task queues (e.g., Celery, Redis, or equivalents).
• Strong software architecture fundamentals:
• domain-driven design concepts
• clean abstractions and separation of concerns
• resilience, fault tolerance, and error-handling patterns
• Hands-on experience with testing strategies across multiple layers.
• Practical knowledge of containers and cloud-native environments (Docker, Kubernetes, major cloud providers).
• Comfort working with CI/CD systems and Git-based development workflows.
• Strong awareness of backend security best practices and secure system design.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to influence technical direction across teams.
Strong Advantages (Nice to Have)
• Experience working in regulated or security-critical domains (e.g., digital identity, fintech, govtech, healthcare).
• Familiarity with object storage systems and caching layers.
• Experience integrating with IAM solutions (OAuth2, OIDC, SAML, MFA, SSO).
• Exposure to event-driven architectures and messaging systems.
• Experience with observability and monitoring stacks.
• Background in multi-tenant architectures and/or on-prem enterprise deployments.
