Principal Data & Information Architect

About the role

You will be a pivotal member of the leadership team, responsible for driving the company's product and platform strategy while overseeing engineering excellence across AI, data, platform, DevOps and infrastructure. This is a mission-critical role for an engineering leader who is both strategic and hands-on, and who can build scalable technologies for global enterprise clients in a fast-paced innovation ecosystem.

Reports to: CEO · Location: Bengaluru, India — hybrid, 3 days a week in office

What you will do

Technology & product leadership

• Define and drive the technology vision, architecture and long-term platform roadmap.
• Oversee the architecture, design and delivery of highly scalable enterprise systems.
• Ensure engineering excellence, velocity and reliability across the product lifecycle.

Engineering & platform management

• Lead platform engineering, product technology, DevOps, infrastructure and Quality Engineering.
• Build robust cloud-native systems using the Azure, AWS and GCP ecosystems.
• Oversee operational effectiveness, including uptime, production reliability and cost optimisation.

Innovation & AI strategy

• Spearhead Mission AI by developing scalable, production-grade AI/ML and GenAI capabilities.
• Own the GenAI/LLM solutions architecture.
• Core specialisation in AI agents and autonomous workflows, data extraction and intelligent automation.
• Direct hands-on architectural oversight of large language models, applied AI and multi-layered deep learning products.
• Extensive expertise in building intelligent document automation systems — similar in complexity to patent parsing, legal workflow automation and structured decision intelligence tools.

Technical leadership

• A proven track record overseeing product architecture, tech strategy and cross-functional engineering execution across core full-stack and AI platforms.
• Collaborate with executive leadership on business strategy, client requirements and product delivery.
• Build, mentor and scale high-performing engineering teams with a growth mindset.
• Establish a strong technology culture grounded in ownership, innovation and continuous learning.

What success looks like

• Mission AI: build a world-class AI system leveraging GenAI, ML and enterprise-grade data engineering.
• Hyper-scaling: architect and scale the platform to match global industry leaders in the IP space.
• Culture building: develop a strong engineering organisation with high ownership, performance and innovation DNA.

Qualifications & experience

• Preferably under 15 years of enterprise software engineering experience across B2B SaaS or technology-first companies; fewer is fine for an exceptional engineer.
• A proven track record of taking early-stage AI/ML prototypes and scaling them into robust enterprise SaaS platforms featuring multi-agent orchestration, complex workflows and decision intelligence.
• Experienced in building and mentoring agile, lean startup teams of full-stack and machine learning engineers from the ground up.
• Proven leadership in defining and executing technology strategy and platform roadmaps.
• Extensive cloud-native engineering experience with Azure, AWS and GCP.

Technical expertise

• Strong full-stack engineering background (Java, Python, JavaScript frameworks).
• Expertise with JS frameworks such as React, Angular and Node.js.
• Experience building and scaling distributed systems and microservices.
• Strong knowledge of databases (SQL, NoSQL), data modelling and unstructured data management.
• Strong understanding of Agile methodologies and tools (Atlassian, Git, CI/CD pipelines).

Behavioural & leadership competencies

• Product and delivery management expertise, end to end, including delivery and customer support.
• Excellent communication, with the ability to influence executive stakeholders.
• High technical proficiency combined with strong business acumen.
• Strong analytical and decision-making skills.

About the Company

As the world moves toward AI-native applications, one element matters more than anything: data.

We are building a platform that helps organizations unlock the value hidden within customer feedback. By centralizing data from multiple sources—including CRM platforms, support systems, collaboration tools, surveys, community forums, and customer conversations—into a unified intelligence layer, we enable teams to understand customer needs and make better product decisions.

Built on top of this foundation is an AI-powered platform that allows teams to query, monitor, and act on customer intelligence directly within their workflows. Our customers include some of the fastest-growing product-led technology companies as well as large global enterprises.

Backed by leading global venture capital firms, our engineering culture is AI-native from the ground up. Agents, LLMs, and applied machine learning are not side projects—they are central to how we build products. We operate at the cutting edge of agentic systems and continuously push the boundaries of what modern AI applications can achieve.

What You Will Do

• Convert product direction into phased technical plans, including estimates, milestones, dependencies, and risk assessments.
• Make thoughtful trade-offs across correctness, latency, user experience, AI/model behavior, reliability, cost, and delivery speed.
• Define clear ownership boundaries across frontend applications, BFF layers, backend services, agent workflows, ML platforms, and data contracts.
• Review ERDs, PRDs, design documents, and implementation plans to identify gaps before they become execution challenges.
• Drive planning and execution for complex initiatives while empowering area leads and senior engineers to maintain ownership.
• Partner closely with Product, Design, Engineering, and GTM teams to turn ambiguous problem statements into executable solutions.
• Influence technical direction through strong engineering judgment, architectural leadership, and hands-on involvement.
• Mentor senior engineers and contribute to engineering excellence through reviews, incident analysis, and proactive risk management.

What It Takes

• 9+ years of experience as a Senior Engineer, Technical Lead, or equivalent role.
• Demonstrated experience owning architecture and execution for large-scale product or platform initiatives spanning multiple teams.
• Strong foundation in distributed systems and modern software architecture.
• Exposure to agentic AI systems, machine learning engineering, MLOps platforms, and frontend/BFF architectures.
• Ability to own end-to-end product and technical problems rather than specializing exclusively in a single layer of the stack.
• Proven track record of converting ambiguity into actionable engineering plans.
• Excellent written communication skills, including design documentation, architectural reviews, trade-off analyses, and RCA documentation.
• Ability to challenge requirements constructively and collaborate effectively across Product, Design, Engineering, and GTM functions.
• High ownership mindset, attention to detail, and a low-ego, collaborative approach.

About the role

We are hiring a Principal Engineer to own the hardest technical problems in our product and see them through from first sketch to stable production. You will set technical direction, design systems that scale, and raise the engineering bar through your own work and the people around you. This is a hands-on leadership role: you write code, review designs, and ship.

What will you do?

You will own outcomes, not just tasks. Expect to spend your time on the following.

• Own projects end to end. Take an ambiguous problem, shape the requirements, design the solution, break down the work, deliver it to production, and stay accountable for how it runs afterwards.

• Lead system design. Author and review architecture for services, data pipelines and integrations, with clear trade-offs on scale, latency, cost, consistency and reliability.

• Write and review critical code. Build the hardest components yourself, and set standards for code quality, testing and maintainability through code and design reviews.

• Own deployment and operations. Design CI/CD, infrastructure and release strategies. Drive observability, on-call readiness, incident response and post-incident learning.

• Solve hard problems. Debug production issues across the stack, and find root causes in performance, concurrency, data and scaling problems.

• Mentor and multiply. Coach senior and junior engineers, grow future tech leads, and make the whole team faster and more confident.

• Partner across functions. Work with product, design, data and business teams to turn goals into technical plans, and to say no or reshape scope when needed.

• Shape technical strategy. Guide build-versus-buy decisions, manage tech debt, evaluate new technologies, and contribute to the engineering roadmap.

• Raise the bar. Help define engineering practices, hiring standards and culture, and take part in interviewing.

What are we looking for?

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Core engineering

• 10+ years of professional software engineering, with a track record of shipping and running production systems.

• Strong computer science fundamentals: data structures, algorithms and complexity, operating systems, networking, databases and concurrency.

• Fluency in at least one major backend language (for example Python, Go, Java, or Node.js/ TypeScript) and the ability to pick up others quickly.

• Deep knowledge of relational and NoSQL data stores: schema design, indexing, transactions, query tuning and replication.

System design and problem solving

• Proven ability to design distributed systems that are scalable, fault tolerant and cost aware, and to explain the trade-offs clearly.

• Experience with APIs, event-driven and asynchronous architectures, queues, caching and service-to-service communication.

• A structured approach to ambiguous problems: break them down, test assumptions, decide with incomplete data, and measure results.

• Strong debugging instincts, including performance profiling and production troubleshooting.

Delivery and operations

• Have led at least two significant projects from inception to production, including planning, milestones, risk management and launch.

• Hands-on experience with deployment: CI/CD pipelines, containers (Docker, Kubernetes), a major cloud (AWS, GCP or Azure), and infrastructure as code.

• Practical experience with monitoring, logging, alerting, SLOs and incident management.

• Habit of writing tests and automation, and of leaving systems more reliable than you found them.

Leadership and communication

• Experience leading engineers without formal authority, through influence, mentoring and clear technical writing.

• Excellent written and verbal communication: design docs, RFCs and concise updates to non-technical stakeholders.

• Ownership mindset, sound judgment on priorities, and comfort working in a fast-moving environment.

Nice to have

• Experience in fintech, lending or another regulated, data-heavy domain.

• Exposure to AI/ML or LLM-based systems in production: model serving, evaluation, retrieval, and cost and latency management.

• Deep experience with data engineering: streaming, batch pipelines, warehouses or search systems.

• Security and compliance awareness: authentication, encryption, audit trails, secure SDLC.

• Experience with multi-tenant SaaS, high-throughput systems or zero downtime migrations.

• Open-source contributions, conference talks, or technical writing.

• Experience scaling an engineering team or helping set up hiring and onboarding practices.

Job Description

ABOUT THE ROLE

The Senior Principal Software Engineer – Full Stack is a key technical leader responsible for defining and driving the technical strategy across the entire engineering function. You will own complex, high-impact systems, deliver enterprise-scale SaaS products at Champion Pace, and serve as a recognized internal subject matter expert — providing thought leadership to redefine the supply chain through an intelligent, adaptive platform.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Architectural Ownership: Design, implement, and lead the development of robust frontend frameworks and backend services, taking end-to-end ownership of critical, cross-functional components.
• Technical Strategy: Apply deep expertise in highly specialized domains to develop complex systems, contribute to company objectives, and drive creative and effective goal achievement.
• Problem Resolution: Proactively debug, diagnose, and resolve highly complex technical issues and performance bottlenecks across the stack with minimal guidance.
• System Design: Apply conceptual thinking to understand advanced technical implications and construct highly scalable system architectures.
• Technical Mentorship: Act as an internal subject matter expert — mentor senior and principal engineers, lead cross-team code reviews, and establish high standards for quality and performance.
• Policy & Principles Guidance: Direct the application of existing technical principles and actively guide development of new policies and engineering standards.
• Code Optimization: Translate complex product and technical requirements into clean, efficient, maintainable code; optimize system architecture for scale and performance.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Build formal networks across organizational groups and collaborate closely with Product, QA, and DevOps to deliver world-class SaaS products.
• Strategic Influence: Convey advanced technical concepts and persuade diverse stakeholder audiences to drive cross-organizational alignment and technical adoption.
• Functional Accountability: Determine methods and procedures on new assignments, taking ultimate responsibility for results that impact the entire engineering function.

Qualifications

MUST-HAVE QUALIFICATIONS

• 12+ years of professional software development experience (8+ with a Master's; 5+ with a PhD).
• Expert-level proficiency in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Java, Node.js, Python, and RESTful APIs.
• Deep experience with microservices, SQL/NoSQL databases, and modern frontend frameworks.
• Proven ability to own and drive complex, cross-functional technical architecture end-to-end.
• Strong track record of mentoring senior engineers and leading technical standards across teams.
• Deep understanding of cloud-native architectures, Agile product development, OOP fundamentals, and data structures & algorithms.

NICE-TO-HAVE

• Experience with agentic or AI-powered platform engineering.
• Familiarity with manufacturing or supply chain SaaS domains.
• Background in AI governance, evaluation, and observability.

Join our product development team at Planview as a Senior Software Engineer I and become a pivotal force on the Viz Core Team. This role offers the unique opportunity to shape and lead the development of data-processing pipelines and APIs that are at the heart of our software solutions. These solutions are designed to streamline and enhance the efficiency of software delivery, resonating deeply with software engineers who strive to build better and faster.

At Planview Viz, which is powered by the innovative “Flow Framework,” you will tackle complex data challenges and develop scalable solutions within an AWS cloud environment. Your efforts will be crucial in revolutionizing how businesses harness and interpret vast amounts of workflow data, transforming it into actionable insights that propel organizational efficiency and effectiveness.

Responsibilities (What you'll do)

• Create and refine powerful data-processing architectures that integrate seamlessly with a diverse array of external tools, enhancing the way software is delivered across industries.
• Drive operational excellence by critically analyzing problems, defining requirements, and devising robust solutions that push the boundaries of technology.
• Lead and inspire a team of talented engineers, promoting a culture of ownership, meticulous attention to quality, and proactive problem-solving.
• Stay at the cutting edge of technology by updating and expanding your team’s knowledge of cloud architectures, data processing, and advanced analytics, ensuring that you and your team remain leaders in technological innovation.
• Make a direct impact on the efficiency and effectiveness of software delivery worldwide through innovation and leadership.

Qualifications (What you'll bring)

Who We’re Looking For

The ideal candidate is a seasoned professional in cloud software development with a strong foundation in data processing and scalable software systems. You thrive in collaborative environments and are passionate about advancing cloud technology and data architecture to new heights. You are a leader who enjoys mentoring, guiding, and inspiring others.

Preferred Qualifications

Skills, Knowledge, and Expertise

• A degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
• 6+ years of experience with a modern programming language, with a focus on back-end systems and cloud-based technologies.
• Strong capability in architecting and designing robust, scalable software systems.
• Proficiency in AWS or another popular cloud platform.

Additional Qualifications

• Experience with big-data technologies such as Spark and Apache Kafka.
• Experience with Java (version 17), Scala, or other JVM programming languages.
• Experience with tools such as Amazon Redshift and MongoDB.
• Experience with continuous integration and continuous deployment tools such as GitHub, Jenkins, Travis CI, or similar platforms.
• Proficiency in test-driven development.
• Experience with containers and orchestration tools such as Kubernetes.
• Experience working on remote or distributed teams and projects.