Principal Engineer

About this job

Payoneer is a global financial platform operating in over 190 countries, dedicated to removing friction from cross-border business and connecting underserved enterprises to the world economy. As a Principal Engineer for backend development based in Gurugram, India, you will serve as a high-impact individual contributor providing technical leadership across the backend organization. Your focus will be shaping the future of distributed financial systems that manage complex global financial workflows. A normal day involves defining architectural vision, designing scalable backend platforms, collaborating with distributed cross-functional teams, mentoring senior engineers and tech leads, and driving an AI-first engineering culture. You will tackle intricate cross-domain technical challenges, establish engineering standards, and explore cutting-edge technologies like agentic workflows and the Model Context Protocol to enhance system reliability and developer productivity.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive technical and architectural vision for large-scale backend systems and distributed platforms.
• Design and build secure, resilient, fault-tolerant distributed systems supporting global financial infrastructure.
• Champion an AI-first software engineering approach utilizing LLMs, AI agents, and intelligent developer tooling.
• Mentor and coach engineering leads, senior engineers, and architects to raise the overall technical bar.
• Partner with engineering, product, security, and infrastructure teams to solve complex cross-domain problems.
• Establish engineering patterns, standards, and best practices across multiple teams without direct authority.
• Explore and prototype emerging technologies such as MCP and agent-based architectures for business value.

Requirements

• Extensive experience designing and building large-scale distributed systems and backend platforms.
• Strong expertise in backend engineering, system architecture, APIs, microservices, and cloud-native architectures.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems concepts like consistency, availability, and fault tolerance.
• Proven experience leading architecture and technical strategy across multiple engineering teams.
• Strong track record of translating ambiguous, complex problems into scalable technical solutions.
• Experience operating systems at significant scale with high availability, security, and reliability requirements.
• Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure, observability, and modern software engineering practices.

Good to have

• Familiarity with AI agents, MCP, tool calling, and agentic workflows.
• Experience with AI/LLM technologies and building AI-first engineering systems.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor senior engineers and technical leaders.
• Strong product mindset balancing technical excellence with business outcomes.

Who should apply

This role suits experienced backend architects and technical leaders with a strong background in distributed systems who enjoy influencing technology direction across an entire organization. Candidates should have a demonstrated history of solving complex architectural challenges at scale, strong mentorship capabilities, and a keen interest in AI-first engineering workflows. The posting does not mention whether freshers can apply; extensive professional experience is implied.

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