Principal Software Engineer - Product Platforms
Role details
Job location
Tech stack
Job description
We're looking for a Principal Software Engineer to help define and build shared, API-first product platforms at AlphaSense that power multiple product surfaces, integrations, and agentic workflows.
In this role, you'll focus on building platforms as products: well-designed APIs, clear contracts, strong reliability guarantees, and a roadmap driven by real product needs. These platforms are consumed by internal product teams, external integrations, including AI agents.
This role sits at the intersection of hands-on engineering and cross-product technical leadership. You'll stay close to the code while shaping how product platforms are designed, evolved, and adopted across the company. You'll also work across multiple teams and domains, helping to align long-term technical direction while still owning end-to-end systems. This is not a people-management role, nor is it a purely advisory architecture role. We're explicitly looking for a Principal who enjoys building, prototyping, iterating, and solving complex problems in production.
What You'll Do:
- Act as a technical owner and force multiplier for API-first architecture across the company
- Design, build, and evolve high-scale APIs used by internal teams, external customers, and intelligent agents
- Lead the development of agentic workflows, including orchestration, state management, tooling, and integration patterns
- Drive API standards, design principles, and best practices through hands-on work and technical reviews
- Tackle complex cross-team problems where requirements are ambiguous, and constraints are real
- Partner with Product, Platform, and SRE teams to ensure APIs are reliable, observable, secure, and scalable
- Identify and reduce systemic technical risks while enabling teams to move faster
- Mentor senior engineers and raise the technical bar through example, not hierarchy
Requirements
- Extensive experience as a senior staff/principal-level software engineer working on applications and backend systems
- Experience building product platforms or shared services consumed by multiple product teams
- Proven track record of designing, building, and operating APIs at scale
- Strong hands-on experience with RESTful APIs
- Some experience with GraphQL (design, usage, or operating in production)
- Deep understanding of system design, performance, reliability, and evolution over time
- Strong bias toward hands-on contribution and ownership of real systems
- Ability to influence technical direction across teams through credibility and execution
Nice to have:
- Experience building or enabling agentic or AI-driven workflows
- Familiarity with MCP (Model Context Protocol) or similar agent integration patterns
- Experience working in large-scale, distributed systems environments
- Exposure to API governance, versioning strategies, and backward compatibility at scale
- Experience working closely with the platform and SRE teams