Principal Engineer I – Prepurchase Platform

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United Kingdom.

📋 Description

• Proactively identify and resolve production issues without external prompts.

• Develop comprehensive, high-availability systems capable of managing significant traffic surges during peak sales periods without performance loss.

• Spearhead platform modernization projects by transitioning legacy services to cloud-native, microservices architectures.

• Create and execute streaming and event-driven solutions utilizing Kafka/gRPC.

• Advocate for resilience strategies, including circuit breakers, graceful degradation, bulkheads, and auto-scaling techniques.

• Collaborate with product, security, and SRE teams to ensure technical decisions align with business objectives.

⛳️ Requirements

• Demonstrated ability to evaluate trade-offs in distributed systems regarding scalability, consistency, availability, and latency, and to make sound design choices under real-life constraints.

• Proven track record in writing production-level code and developing high-traffic systems at scale.

• Proficient in Java (17+) and the JVM, with a strong understanding of JVM internals, garbage collection behavior, and performance optimization under load.

• Practical experience with a reactive, non-blocking framework (such as Vert.x, Spring WebFlux, or similar) and designing asynchronous, event-driven services.

• Extensive experience in stream processing and event-driven architecture, including Kafka Streams, Apache Flink, or equivalent technologies.

• Established history of building high-throughput, low-latency systems where considerations for tail latency, backpressure, and memory pressure are paramount.

• Strong proficiency in gRPC and binary serialization formats like FlatBuffers, Avro, or Protobuf.

• Understanding of Data-Oriented Design (DoD) principles, focusing on structuring code for optimal data layout, access, and transformation for cache efficiency and throughput.

• Experience with compact, search-oriented data structures.

🏝️ Benefits

• Generous vacation

• Healthcare benefits

• Retirement benefits

• Student loan repayment

• Tuition reimbursement

• Six months of paid caregiver leave for new parents, including fostering

• Access to free live events through our exclusive employee ticketing program