Principal Backend Engineer

Location: Fully Remote
Preferred Time Zones: GMT+1 or CST
Reports To: VP of Engineering
Team: Platform / Cross‑Product Initiatives

About

We’re a rapidly growing SEO software company and full‑service digital agency helping websites improve their Google performance. From Fortune 500 companies to Silicon Valley startups, our clients trust us to drive results.

Role Overview

We’re hiring a Principal Backend Engineer to drive cross‑product technical initiatives across our SEO intelligence platform. This is a hands‑on technical leadership role focused on solving complex problems, hardening and scaling core systems, and elevating engineering standards across multiple product teams.

You’ll partner directly with senior leadership (VP Eng, PM, DevOps) to architect and evolve backend foundations that impact every service in our ecosystem. You’ll also play a key role in our hiring bar—interviewing and calibrating Lead Backend Engineer candidates for new product pods.

Important: We’re seeking a proven Principal (not a “step‑up”). You should have already operated at Principal scope and pace in a high‑velocity environment.

What You’ll Do

Lead platform‑wide initiatives and scalable architecture design across multiple services and product lines.
Own technical direction alongside the VP Eng: system design, coding standards, performance practices, and platform consistency.
Architect and evolve Django REST, Celery, and PostgreSQL systems for scalability, reliability, and data integrity.
Raise the engineering bar through design reviews, code reviews, technical deep dives, and periodic audits.
Drive observability and performance optimization using Sentry, Datadog, Grafana; partner with DevOps to standardize tracing/monitoring/alerting.
Champion production readiness: robust testing, CI/CD, rollout/rollback strategies, SLOs/SLIs, and incident response playbooks.
Evaluate and introduce technologies that deliver measurable technical or business value (with clear adoption guidelines).
Collaborate cross‑functionally with Product and QA to deliver end‑to‑end excellence across pods.
Influence hiring: participate in interviewing Lead Backend Engineers and setting the technical bar.

What Success Looks Like (First 60–90 Days)

Ramp fast: meaningfully deliver code within 2 weeks; establish credibility across teams.
Stabilize and scale at least one cross‑product pathway (e.g., ingestion → processing → analytics) with measurable latency/cost/quality wins.
Codify standards for API design, async processing, and data access that pods can adopt consistently.

Requirements

8+ years with Python 3 and Django REST Framework (including at least 1 year employed at Principal level, non‑negotiable).
Deep understanding of Django internals, ORM optimization, REST API design, and distributed/asynchronous architectures with Celery.
Strong PostgreSQL expertise (schema design, indexing, query optimization, migrations at scale).
Proven experience designing/operating multi‑service or microservice systems.
Production experience with observability stacks (Sentry, Datadog, Grafana) and modern CI/CD.
Comfortable with Git‑based workflows (GitLab preferred).
Exceptional communication skills: able to explain complex, data‑heavy SaaS systems to technical and non‑technical stakeholders.
Startup‑ready: thrive in a high‑velocity environment; comfortable shipping iteratively (we’ve shipped products in < 7 weeks).

Nice to Have

Experience with ClickHouse or Elasticsearch for large‑scale analytics/search.
Familiarity with OpenAPI or DRF Spectacular.
Working knowledge of Kubernetes (DevOps owns infra; familiarity is valuable).
Understanding of caching strategies, profiling tools, and async patterns at scale.
Interest in developer experience improvements (tooling, automation, templates).

Benefits

15 Days Paid Time Off + Christmas Day + New Year’s Day paid.
Equity potential after demonstrating outcomes; tied to a planned RPO within ~2 years.

Work Location & Time Zones

Fully Remote — work from anywhere.
Collaboration across pods works best from GMT+1 or CST time zones (preferred but not strictly required).

Principal Backend Engineer - 16144