Software Developer - Backend

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.

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.

ABOUT THE ROLE

The Principal Software Engineer – Java will play a pivotal role in designing, developing, mentoring and maintaining high-performance IT system for Hapag-Lloyd. The role requires deep expertise in Java and microservices-based architecture, along with a strong focus on code quality, performance, and scalability. The ideal candidate will be a passionate engineer who thrives in a Java development agile environment and brings a solution-oriented mindset to collaborative product development. As a senior technical expert, you will be responsible for low-level and high-level architectural design, mentoring developers, and working closely with team in Hamburg & Chennai. The ideal candidate is a passionate, solution oriented engineer with a proven track record in leading technical projects within an agile environment.

WORK EXPERIENCE:

9–14 years of hands-on experience in development using Java, JEE, JPA, JUnit, Kafka, and Microservices. Good Experience in AWS. Strong experience in architectural design – both low-level and high-level. Experience building distributed systems and working in microservices-based architecture. Proficient with Kafka and message-driven architecture. Strong experience with relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL). Sound understanding of modern DevOps practices, including CI/CD pipelines, containerization, and cloud deployment. Experience working in Agile/Scrum-based teams with exposure to software lifecycle tools (e.g., Git, Jenkins, JIRA).

Technical Skills Java, JEE, JPA, JUnit, Microservices Kafka (Desired), REST API development SQL, PostgreSQL Git, Maven, Jenkins (Desired), Familiarity with Docker, Kubernetes, and cloud platforms (eg. AWS)

EDUCATION & QUALIFICATIONS Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Engineering, or related discipline

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES & TASKS

Software Development & Design Design and develop scalable, reliable, and high-performance applications using Java, JPA, Kafka, Microservices, Junit, API and PostgreSQL. Lead low-level and high-level design discussions and decisions for scalable architecture. Build and maintain microservices architecture using industry best practices. Drive technology innovation. Write clean, efficient, well-documented code with high unit test coverage using JUnit.

Mentorship :

Mentor and guide developers and team members in coding standards, best practices, and problem-solving. Conduct regular code reviews, peer programming, and provide technical leadership to ensure code quality and continuous improvement.

Systems Integration & Tools:

Work with messaging systems such as Kafka to build real-time data processing services. Implement and optimize data access using SQL /PostgreSQL databases. Participate in the design and implementation of DevOps pipelines for CI/CD.

Quality, Testing & Documentation:

Conduct regular code reviews and participate in peer programming and Peer coding Review. Perform system testing, validation, and verification across development stages. Contribute to technical documentation throughout the software development lifecycle

Agile Collaboration & Continuous Improvement:

Collaborate closely with Product Managers, Engineering Managers, Scrum Masters, and developers in agile teams. Participate in sprint planning, retrospectives, and demos. Remain current on new technologies and drive adoption of best engineering practices across the team.

BEHAVIOURS & APPROACH

Strong analytical and problem-solving skills Team-oriented with excellent communication and collaboration skills Passion for clean code, architecture, and continuous learning Ability to work independently with a proactive approach to problem-solving