Senior Principal Engineer / Chief Engineer

Role Summary

A top-tier hands-on technical leader shaping Elmenus’ long-term backend, data, and infrastructure architecture. You own complex distributed systems, drive platform-scale initiatives, and solve the hardest technical problems across ordering, catalog, logistics, payments, and data. No people management—your impact comes from deep technical execution and architectural leadership.

Key Responsibilities

Architecture & Technical Strategy

• Define and evolve core architecture across Java/Scala microservices.

• Lead platform-wide initiatives: reliability, scalability, service decomposition, caching, EDT/ETA systems.

Hands-On Engineering

• Design, build, and optimize distributed systems with millions of requests/day.

• Write high-quality production code; build prototypes and reference implementations.

• Lead performance tuning and deep technical investigations.

Cross-Functional Technical Leadership

• Collaborate with Product, Data, Ops, and ML on system design and feasibility.

• Influence engineering standards through design reviews and technical direction (no direct reports).

• Actively participate in team agile rituals, backlog management, user stories and tasks detailing.

Data & Infra Architecture

• Improve AWS/Terraform infrastructure, CI/CD (CircleCI), and observability (Datadog).

• Architect pipelines across Airflow, Spark, Redshift, S3, dbt, and DMS.

Technical Documentation

• Help fill-in technical documentation gaps actively and when discovered, maintaining our technical writing standards

• Actively review and hands-on participation in reviewing tech artefacts and RFCs

Requirements

• Architecture & DDD Expertise: Strong command of large-scale architecture, DDD, bounded contexts, and API contracts. Designs cohesive end-to-end systems across web, native apps, and platform services.

• High-Scale Systems Experience: 10+ years building complex, high-traffic distributed systems with expertise in concurrency, performance optimization, and scalable data access.

• Deep Technical Expertise: Experienced with JVM-based languages (Java/Scala), along with Node.js & TypeScript.

• Cross-Platform Reasoning: Comfortable collaborating to align data flows, API surfaces, state management, and performance expectations across Web, iOS, and Android platforms.

• Cloud & Infrastructure Competency: Strong AWS knowledge (RDS, Redshift, S3, ECS, VPC) with proficiency in Terraform and modern CI/CD, observability, and reliability principles.

• Data & ML Architecture Awareness: Familiar with large-scale data pipelines (Airflow, Spark, dbt, DMS) and high-level ML-serving patterns relevant to EDT/ETA, personalization, and real-time signals.

• Leadership Through Technical Depth (Non-Manager): Influences through architectural clarity, hands-on problem solving, and strong technical judgment. Drives alignment across teams without managing people directly.

Bonus

• Experience in food delivery, logistics, or mobility products

• Streaming platforms (Kafka or similar)

• Experimentation/A/B testing and reliability engineering.