Principal Engineer – AI-Native Product Platform

Company: KAVIA AI

Location: India (Remote or Hybrid; collaboration with global teams)

Type: Full-time

About KAVIA AI

KAVIA AI is an enterprise software company with a live, production AI platform in use today.

We build an AI-native workflow and reasoning layer for the full software development lifecycle — spanning requirements, architecture, code, testing, CI/CD, and long-term maintenance. Our platform is used by enterprise teams working on real, large-scale codebases, not demos or internal experiments.

AI at KAVIA is foundational. The platform is built around agent-based orchestration, enterprise knowledge graphs, and full lifecycle traceability, enabling teams to understand, evolve, and ship complex software systems with speed and confidence.

As the platform and customer footprint scale, we’re hiring a Principal Engineer to work directly with the founders and help shape the next phase of KAVIA’s technical and organizational evolution.

The Role

This is a senior, hands-on technical leadership role on an existing, production platform.

As a Principal Engineer, you will work closely with the founders as a core technical partner. You will help drive architectural decisions, evolve systems already in customer use, and define and enforce engineering standards and architectural principles as the company scales.

This role complements an existing engineering team and production platform already supporting enterprise customers. You will operate with first-generation ownership and influence across the platform. 

This role is ideal for an experienced engineer who wants deep technical scope, real authority, and responsibility for systems that enterprise customers depend on — while collaborating closely with a globally distributed leadership and engineering team.

What You’ll Do

Evolve the Core Platform

• Design and implement key systems across:
• LLM-powered agents and orchestration workflows
• Knowledge-graph-driven representations of code, products, and workflows
• Code generation, analysis, testing, and CI/CD automation
• Extend and harden systems already in production, balancing delivery speed with long-term durability

Technical Leadership & Ownership

• Partner directly with the founders on architecture and execution strategy
• Own major technical domains end-to-end
• Define and enforce engineering standards, architectural principles, and quality bars as the team grows

Hands-On Engineering

• Write, review, and refactor production code regularly
• Debug complex issues across AI workflows, backend services, and integrations
• Improve performance, observability, reliability, and developer experience

Production Operations

• Operate and support production systems used by enterprise customers
• Participate in incident response, root cause analysis, and post-incident improvements
• Design systems that anticipate failure modes and scale safely

Security & Enterprise Readiness

• Design systems with strong security boundaries, tenant isolation, and auditability
• Ensure architecture supports enterprise trust, compliance, and procurement expectations

Team & Engineering Culture

• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers
• Lead by example in technical judgment, decision-making, and system design
• Help establish development workflows appropriate for a growing enterprise SaaS company

Product & Customer Impact

• Work directly with enterprise customers and real-world codebases
• Translate ambiguous requirements into concrete, scalable solutions
• Influence product direction through technical insight and customer feedback

What We’re Looking For

Required

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience
• Experience as a principal-level engineer or technical lead on complex systems
• Strong backend engineering skills (Python; FastAPI a plus)
• Experience with various frontend technologies - React, Next.JS, etc
• Proven ability to design, evolve, and own production systems
• Experience designing and operating secure, cloud-hosted, multi-tenant or single-tenant SaaS platforms (AWS or equivalent)
• Experience designing and operating graph-based or highly relational data models at scale
• Experience designing systems with strong security boundaries, tenant isolation, and auditability suitable for enterprise environments
• Experience operating and supporting production systems, including incident response and post-incident improvement
• Ability to reason across frontend and backend boundaries 
• Comfort operating in fast-moving environments with real customers

Strong Plus

• Experience building AI-powered systems that integrate with both open and closed-source LLMs
• Experience designing systems resilient to model evolution and vendor change
• Experience with developer platforms, code analysis, or CI/CD pipelines
• Familiarity with SaaS compliance requirements (e.g., SOC 2), cloud marketplace listings, or enterprise procurement expectations
• Prior experience scaling a product already in customer use

Why This Role Is Interesting

• Direct collaboration with the founders
• Principal-level scope on a real, production AI platform
• Deep technical problems at the intersection of AI and enterprise software
• Opportunity to shape architecture, standards, and engineering culture

Who This Role Is a Good Fit For

This role tends to resonate with engineers who:

• Enjoy owning systems end-to-end
• Care about durability, correctness, security, and long-term design
• Prefer shipping real software over chasing AI hype
• Want influence and responsibility
• Influence how millions of developers build software in the future