Principal Engineer (Mobile Platform & Backend Systems)

Join AlphaSense, a leading AI-powered search and research platform. As a Principal Engineer, you will shape the backend systems that support our mobile applications and drive technical direction across engineering organizations. You will work closely with product and customer needs, lead delivery of cross-team services, and help engineers deepen their technical expertise. This role offers the opportunity to make a significant impact on the company's architecture and product capabilities.

• Shape the systems behind product experiences by setting technical direction for client-facing APIs and backend architecture.
• Lead delivery of services and subsystems that span team boundaries, from choosing the technical approach to implementing the hardest parts.
• Help engineers deepen their technical judgment and build the expertise to own and evolve the systems you deliver together.
• Your strongest experience should be in backend and platform engineering, with client needs informing your architectural decisions. Prior iOS or Android development experience is not required
• Experience designing client-facing REST and GraphQL APIs, with sound judgment about business-logic placement, product states, and backward compatibility. Understanding of how mobile lifecycle and network constraints affect backend design
• Deep production backend and distributed-systems expertise, including service boundaries, data ownership, consistency, failure recovery, and integration models. A track record of simplifying complex architectures with impact across teams or domains
• Strong understanding of authentication, authorization, entitlements, and session management, including trust boundaries and the security implications of client-service interactions
• A track record of leading consequential technical change across teams through influence rather than reporting authority
• Experience improving customer-visible reliability and performance across client and backend systems, with practical expertise in observability and production validation
• Product and stakeholder leadership that connects technical decisions to customer value. Demonstrated success challenging assumptions and building alignment with senior leaders, balancing immediate customer and product needs with durable foundations other teams can build on
• Strong hands-on engineering experience, with significant personal contributions to production code and system evolution. Ability to develop a deep understanding of unfamiliar codebases and turn investigation into sound engineering decisions
• Experience building production systems for AI-powered search, research, or analysis workflows
• Experience with enterprise identity and managed applications, such as Auth0, Microsoft identity, or MDM/MAM ecosystems
• Experience designing shared configuration or service discovery for multi-tenant platforms and dedicated customer environments
• Experience designing and building event-driven systems, including publish/subscribe or event-streaming architectures such as Kafka