Principal EngineerData & Infra

About Exotel
Exotel is one of Asias largest and most trusted customer engagement platforms From voice to SMS, WhatsApp to AI-led contact centre intelligence, we help businesses deliver seamless, secure, and scalable conversations with their customers As we grow, our focus remains on customer centricity, operational excellence, and smart automation to power the next generation of experiences, Platform Engineering @ Exotel The Platform Engineering group is responsible for the distributed systems and data infrastructure that power Exotels products The teams work directly impacts reliability, scalability, security, and performance across the entire Exotel stack We abstract complex distributed systems and data management challenges to enable faster innovation, stronger reliability, and better business productivity, Role Overview As a Principal Engineer Data & Infrastructure, you will be a technical leader driving the architecture, design, and implementation of high-scale, high-reliability distributed data systems You will partner closely with product and engineering leaders to define the technical roadmap, guide engineering best practices, and mentor senior engineers This is a hands-on leadership role, requiring deep technical expertise and the ability to influence and align teams toward long-term strategic goals, Key Responsibilities Own the architecture and delivery of data infrastructure projects: data pipelines, data analytics platforms, reporting frameworks, distributed databases, and messaging systems, Evaluate, adopt, and integrate emerging big data and distributed computing technologies to improve scalability, reliability, and performance, Collaborate with cross-functional teams on data modelling, architecture, and governance strategies, Provide technical leadership for design reviews, architecture discussions, and system optimisations, Mentor senior engineers and contribute to building a strong engineering culture, Drive operational excellence by implementing monitoring, alerting, and SLA adherence, Lead initiatives to optimise infrastructure costs, improve automation, and enhance deployment workflows, Be hands-on in solving complex engineering challenges related to distributed systems and low-latency data access, What Were Looking For Must-haves 711 years of experience in software engineering, with at least 3+ years in a technical leadership role, Proven experience building and scaling data platforms (data pipelines, data APIs, reporting frameworks, and connectors), Strong experience with distributed databases (MySQL, Aerospike, Elasticsearch, Redis, etc) and messaging systems, Expertise in Java, Go, or equivalent systems programming languages, Experience with Kubernetes, EKS Familiarity with few of the technologies like Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Jenkins, VPN, Kafka etc Experience leading engineering teams through architecture definition, execution, and delivery, A DevOps mindset own what you build, from design to production operations Strong Computer Science fundamentals: algorithms, data structures, distributed systems design, Good-to-haves Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and IaC tools (Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Terraform), Familiarity with AI/ML data pipelines, Experience operating production-scale distributed systems, Exposure to serverless, orchestration engines, or advanced big data frameworks,