Principal Engineer - Python Backend [T500-29508]

1WRK by ANSR

Principal Engineer

Full-Time | Experience: 8-12 Years | Location: Bangalore/Hybrid

About the Role:

1WRK by ANSR is hiring a Principal Engineer to own the technical direction of critical systems across our platform. This is a senior, hands-on technical leadership role for an engineer who thinks in an AI-first way, is comfortable working primarily in Python, and has the depth to make lasting architecture decisions — while mentoring the engineers around them to raise the bar for the whole team.

What You'll Do:

• Architecture ownership: Own the architecture and long-term technical roadmap for one or more critical systems, making build-vs-buy and technology bet decisions with clear reasoning.
• AI-first delivery: Push the team toward an AI-first way of building software — using AI tools/agents to accelerate the SDLC, and identifying where AI/LLM capabilities belong inside the product itself.
• Hands-on engineering: Stay hands-on — write production code, review designs and pull requests, and set the technical bar through your own work, not just through documents.
• Scalable, cost-aware design: Design software and modules that are highly optimized for scale and cost, and hold the broader engineering team to the same standard.
• Secure by design: Champion secure SDLC practices across the systems you own — threat modeling, secure coding, dependency hygiene, and security reviews as a default, not an afterthought.
• Technical mentorship: Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, run design and code reviews, and grow the team's depth in system design, data structures, and Python engineering.
• Cross-team influence: Act as a trusted technical voice across engineering, product, and leadership — surfacing risks, trade-offs, and options in plain language.
• Standards & best practices: Define and evolve engineering standards for backend design, event-driven systems, database usage, and AWS deployment across teams.

What We're Looking For:

• 10-14 years of overall backend/software engineering experience, with a track record of owning architecture for complex, production systems at scale.
• AI-first engineering mindset: You default to using AI tools and agents to accelerate design, coding, testing, and documentation, and you actively look for places to embed AI/LLM capabilities into the systems you build.
• Backend engineering, Python-first: Deep backend engineering skills across any modern stack, with a strong preference and hands-on depth in Python frameworks (e.g., Django, FastAPI, Flask) — willing and able to work primarily in Python.
• Data structures & algorithms: Rock-solid command of data structures and algorithms, and the judgment to pick the right one for a given performance and complexity trade-off.
• System design: Proven ability to design large-scale, distributed systems — service boundaries, data flow, failure modes, and trade-offs between consistency, availability, and latency.
• Secure SDLC: Strong understanding of secure software development lifecycle practices — threat modeling, secure coding standards, dependency and vulnerability scanning, secrets management, and security reviews baked into every stage of delivery.
• Advanced analytical & out-of-the-box thinking: Sharp analytical skills paired with a genuine willingness to challenge conventional approaches and propose creative, non-obvious solutions to hard problems.
• Databases: Fair to strong understanding of relational and NoSQL databases — schema design, indexing, query optimization, and choosing the right store for the job.
• Event-driven systems: Experience designing and operating event-driven architectures — queues, pub/sub, streaming (e.g., SQS/SNS, Kafka, EventBridge) — and reasoning about ordering, idempotency, and failure handling.
• Scale & cost optimization: Ability to design software and modules that are highly optimized for both scale and cost, making deliberate trade-offs rather than defaulting to the most expensive option.
• AWS deployment: Practical, hands-on experience getting software deployed and running reliably on AWS (e.g., EC2, ECS/EKS, Lambda, S3, RDS/DynamoDB, CloudFormation/Terraform, CI/CD pipelines).
• Strong software engineering fundamentals — clean, testable, well-documented code, and disciplined use of version control and code review.
• A genuine ownership mindset — you see problems through to resolution, in production, not just to a passing test.
• Debugging and observability instincts — comfortable using logs, metrics, and tracing to root-cause issues under pressure.
• Strong written and verbal communication — able to document decisions clearly and explain trade-offs to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders.
• A learning mindset — you pick up new tools, frameworks, and AI capabilities quickly and share what you learn.
• Collaboration across functions — comfortable working closely with product, design, and other engineering teams.
• Experience mentoring engineers and influencing technical direction without necessarily having formal people-management responsibility.

Nice to Have:

• Experience in SaaS, HR-tech, or global workforce/EOR platforms.
• Experience building or integrating LLM-based / agentic features into production systems.
• Exposure to infrastructure-as-code (Terraform/CDK) and platform/DevOps practices.
• Prior experience as a staff/principal engineer, architect, or technical lead.
• Contributions to open-source projects, technical blogs, or internal engineering standards.

What Success Looks Like:

• Systems you've architected scale predictably, stay within cost targets, and hold up under real production load.
• Engineers around you write better-designed, more secure code because of the standards and reviews you set.
• Leadership relies on you as the technical authority for what's possible, at what cost, and with what risk.

Why Join 1WRK by ANSR:

• You'll have real ownership of hard technical problems, the room to make lasting architectural decisions, and a direct line to product and business impact.