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Principal Engineer - Backend

Encord· Engineering
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Hybrid (London)£150k - £200kFull-timePosted 3w ago

About the role

Principal Backend Engineer role on Encord’s Foundations team, focused on designing and building large-scale, distributed, data-intensive backend systems and databases with a long-term platform view.

Responsibilities

  • Design and lead major database and processing-system initiatives
  • Design performant protocols and APIs, such as our label-format API, that customers use directly. This work sits across both product and engineering
  • Build robust distributed systems and reason rigorously about how they fail and how they behave under load
  • Level up engineers across the company through design reviews, pairing, and mentorship, without adding process for its own sake

Qualifications

  • 10+ years building large-scale backend infrastructure applications, including several years operating at staff/principal level with company-wide technical influence
  • Deep expertise in distributed systems (databases, processing systems, replication, partitioning, queuing, caching) and a rigorous understanding of how they fail and behave under load at scale
  • Experience leading large-scale data migrations and system-splitting or re-architecture projects with real customer data on the line
  • Experience owning reliability and operations in production, including monitoring, alerting, and DevOps/SRE
  • A track record of raising engineering quality across teams through architecture reviews, code reviews, testing, rollout, and monitoring practices
  • Demonstrated ability to influence without authority, driving technical alignment across teams in a fast-moving, low-process environment

Benefits

  • Competitive salary, commission, and meaningful equity in a high-growth startup
  • Strong in-person culture: the team works from our London office 4+ days/week
  • 25 days annual leave + UK public holidays
  • Annual learning & development budget
  • Travel for customer visits, events, and conferences across the UK and Europe
  • Company lunches twice a week
  • Monthly socials & bi-annual team offsites
Last updated Sep 30, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
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About Encord

Building the data backbone for the (artificial) intelligence…

Encord is the leading data platform for AI. We help top AI teams get models into production faster with human-in-the-loop workflows for labeling and RLHF, infrastructure for data-centric model testing, and powerful data curation and management.

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