Senior Engineer
Experience Required: 15+ Years
Role Type: Full-Time | Hands-On Architecture + Engineering
1. Role Summary
Senior Engineer
This role requires:
- Expert-level system design capability
- Ability to handle complex business and technical requirements
- Hands-on engineering expertise
- Deep understanding of distributed systems
- Strong clarity in architecture and communication
- Leadership in influencing technical direction
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2. Key Responsibilities
A. End-to-End System Architecture
- Architect complete systems from initial concept to production rollout.
- Identify and define system boundaries, components, and service responsibilities.
- Produce both high-level and low-level design artifacts (HLD, LLD).
- Ensure architectures meet scaling, reliability, security, and performance goals.
- Establish clear trade-offs for design decisions backed by solid engineering reasoning.
B. Component-Level Design
- Break complex systems into independently deployable components.
- Define APIs, communication contracts, schemas, and data models.
- Apply modern architecture patterns (DDD, microservices, event-driven, CQRS, hexagonal).
- Ensure clarity around responsibilities, dependencies, and interaction patterns.
- Validate component-level design for maintainability and extensibility.
C. Communication Layers & Protocol Architecture
- Design synchronous and asynchronous communication pathways:
- REST, RPC, GraphQL, gRPC
- Message queues (SQS, Pub/Sub)
- Streaming systems (Kafka, Pulsar, Kinesis)
- Establish:
- Retry, timeout, and fallback strategies
- Circuit breakers and rate limiting
- Message ordering, partitioning, checkpointing
- Delivery semantics (at-least-once, exactly-once, at-most-once)
- Backpressure handling mechanisms
- Implement contract versioning and evolution.
D. Data Architecture & Storage Strategy
- Design data models, storage systems, and access patterns for:
- SQL databases
- NoSQL stores (document, key-value, columnar, graph)
- Distributed caches
- Blob/object stores
- Search indexes
- Define:
- Sharding, partitioning, replication models
- Consistency and durability requirements
- Indexing, query optimization, storage lifecycle
- Backup/restore, schema evolution strategies
- Architect real-time and batch data flows for large-scale processing.
E. Scalability, Performance & Reliability
- Build systems supporting:
- High throughput
- Low latency
- Horizontal scaling
- Peak load handling
- Implement:
- Caching strategies
- Load balancing approaches
- High availability (HA) patterns
- Auto-scaling policies
- Multi-region failover and disaster recovery
- Use resiliency techniques:
- Bulkheads
- Fallback mechanisms
- Graceful degradation
- Chaos engineering
F. Security, Compliance & Governance
- Enforce strong system security:
- Encryption in transit & at rest
- API security protocols
- Identity & access controls
- Secrets & key management
- Ensure systems maintain:
- Auditability
- Traceability
- Policy enforcement
- Least privilege access
- Integrate compliance requirements based on organizational standards.
G. Leadership & Technical Influence
- Drive architectural vision across engineering teams.
- Align architecture with long-term technical strategy.
- Mentor engineers, guide design discussions, review implementations.
- Present architectural decisions in a clear, structured manner.
- Establish reusable internal frameworks and best practices.
- Lead issue resolution during critical production events.
3. Required Skills & Expertise
A. Technical Expertise
- Extensive knowledge of distributed systems fundamentals:
- CAP theorem
- Consistency models
- Eventual consistency and replication
- Leader election & consensus protocols
- Strong capabilities in:
- Backend languages (Java, Go, Python, Rust, Node.js, etc.)
- Distributed messaging and streaming
- API design and microservice patterns
- CI/CD, Kubernetes, containers
- Cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure)
- Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation)
- Observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger, ELK, OpenTelemetry)
B. Architectural Skills
- Ability to design systems handling:
- Millions of daily active users
- Millions of requests per second
- Global multi-region traffic
- Sub-200ms latency requirements
- Experience with:
- Event-driven architectures
- Data-intensive platforms
- Real-time processing systems
- Distributed caches and storage layers
C. Behavioural Skills
- Deep analytical reasoning and systems thinking.
- Ability to simplify complexity without compromising design integrity.
- High accountability and ownership.
- Strong communication and documentation skills.
- Leadership in high-pressure, fast-moving environments.
4. Deep Capability Requirements
The candidate must be able to clearly demonstrate the capability to:
1. Architect complex systems end-to-end, including:
- Functional & non-functional decomposition
- Component architecture
- Communication & interaction flows
- Deployment and runtime architecture
2. Produce comprehensive, high-quality technical artifacts:
- System context diagrams
- Component diagrams
- Sequence diagrams
- Data flow diagrams
- API contracts
- Event schemas
- ER models
- Deployment topology (multi-AZ, multi-region)
3. Evaluate and decide on technologies, based on:
- Throughput / latency
- Consistency guarantees
- Complexity
- Cost models
- Operational lift
- Fault tolerance
4. Solve systemic architectural challenges such as:
- Hot partition avoidance
- Traffic spikes and overload
- Distributed coordination
- Event ordering and replay
- Cache invalidation
- Deadlocks / race conditions
- Consistent hashing and routing
- Multi-region consistency
5. Lead design and recovery in critical scenarios:
- Major outages
- Production failures
- Performance bottlenecks
- Cross-service failures
- Release rollback/mitigation
5. Minimum Qualifications
- 10+ years in backend engineering, distributed systems, or architecture.
- Proven track record of designing complex, large-scale systems.
- Strong coding ability in at least one major backend language.
- Experience with large distributed data and messaging systems.
- Experience owning systems end-to-end in production.
6. Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with massive-scale systems (millionsbillions of events daily).
- Expertise in real-time / streaming / low-latency architectures.
- Experience leading engineering teams architecturally.
- Exposure to multi-tenant environments.
- Advanced understanding of reliability engineering.
7. Overall Summary for Job Boards
Seeking a Senior Systems Architect / Principal Engineer to design and deliver highly complex, scalable, secure, fault-tolerant distributed systems end-to-end — with deep ownership of components, communication flows, data architectures, reliability engineering, and operational readiness.
